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Print & screen effect

Brian’s Brain

Brian’s Brain is a halftone and retro screen effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. A three-state automaton that can never hold still — every firing cell has to spend a generation refractory, so the board is permanently full of travelling wavefronts.

Runs live on video, images, a camera or generated art. Stack it with any other effect, and route LFOs, envelopes or any of ten audio bands to its controls so it moves with the music.

Try Brian’s Brain free All effects

The untouched demo art: an eye inside a triangle over wavy teal, blue and peach lines — Source

The eye-in-triangle art with light-blue square cells scattered in short travelling lines and clusters — Brian’s Brain, default settings

What Brian’s Brain does

A three-state board: a resting cell fires on exactly two firing neighbours, then sits out a generation before it can fire again. That rule never settles, so fronts keep travelling in straight lines, a light-blue firing edge trailed by darker orange spent cells. Afterglow sets how visible that trail is, Density how much fires at the start, and Glow the light each front throws.

Using Brian’s Brain

Where it works: Peak-time loops and drops that need constant motion without a feedback smear. Unlike Life Bloom it can't die out, and unlike Cyclic Automaton it leaves the picture showing between the fronts.
With the music: Generations tick on the clock, not the beat, so the fronts run regardless. Send B8 hats to Glow for the firing edges to flare with the hi-hats, and B1 kick to Revive to fire new cells from the picture on each kick.
Starting point: Scale at centre, Density at centre, Revive at a quarter, Afterglow at three-quarters, Glow at centre, Blend at three-quarters.

Controls

Scale: Size of one cell.
Density: How much of the board starts firing.
Revive: How often the picture fires a fresh cell. This rule sustains itself, so unlike Life this is here to keep tying the board to the clip rather than to keep it alive.
Afterglow: How visible the spent cells are behind a wavefront. They are what make the fronts read as travelling in a direction rather than as flickering.
Tint: Colour of a firing cell.
Glow: Extra light thrown by the firing front.
Blend: Weight of the board over the picture underneath.
Speed: Rate of the effect motion. Centre is the authored speed, hard left a tenth of it.

Pairs well with Brian’s Brain