The Synchronicity Engine

The Synchronicity Engine is a recursive video system that accumulates its own recent past into the present moment. Stand in front of it and you see yourself, but not only yourself: beneath you, layered into the same image, are the traces of everyone who stood here minutes ago.

The system captures live video, compresses it progressively, and feeds the result back into itself. Each cycle adds another layer of recent history. The image becomes a live object that holds time inside itself as it is being made.

The pipeline has three stages:

Capture. A camera records a scene. The playback of that scene is screen-captured. The playback of that is screen-captured. Real time folds into shorter and shorter playback.

Compress. Each generation packs more source seconds into fewer output seconds. Visual artefacts accumulate. The image gains weight, strangeness, and abstraction with every pass.

Choose. A decision layer reads motion, duration, and activity to shape what is revealed and when. Human gestures persist and amplify across generations. Periods of stillness compress away. The output is authored by the machine in real time.

Duration becomes visible. The image gains density with every pass until it can barely hold what it contains.

Two performers begin assembling the machine on stage. A camera, already running, captures them at work. Early moments of the build reappear inside later frames, faster, layered. Cables, screens, gestures of construction compress and accumulate across generations. By the time the machine is complete, it has recorded and is still replaying its own coming-into-being.

A machine witnessing its own construction.

The project page at ffilm.org/synchronicityengine doubles as an Arts Council of Wales Creative Practice Development application. It includes a live interactive webcam demo of the core concept running in the browser, the full development structure (15 working days across 8 weeks), budget breakdown, and documentation of the technical approach.

The development phase focuses on proving the core pipeline: recursive capture, temporal compression, and an intelligence layer (heuristic motion detection first, then ML image recognition with consultation from Dr Yipeng Qin at Cardiff University). Collaborator Nicusor Florea grounds the system in the demands of live performance. The phase concludes with a public open studio at Volcano Theatre, Swansea.

The Synchronicity Engine is the latest iteration of a long obsession with building a practical time machine. Not escape from reality, but participation in emergence: a system where the future exerts pressure backwards into the present, and the room carries its own recent past visibly alongside the now.