Feedback

A screen shows the room it is standing in, so the room appears inside itself, and inside that copy again. The frame turns into a tunnel that runs away from the viewer.

It reads as a loop with no exit. Surveillance, a mind circling, a signal eating itself, all of them land from the same picture.

Point a camera at the monitor showing its own output. The delay between capture and display is what builds the stack, so each level lags the one in front of it and a movement ripples inward over a second or two.

Angle and distance set the shape. Square on, the copies stack straight back. Tilt the camera a few degrees and the tunnel spirals. Small changes at the front become large ones by the fifth level.

Screen texture is the tell. Scan lines, refresh banding and the slight colour shift of a display all multiply with each level, so the deep copies are dirtier and more saturated than the first.

Use it for surveillance, for a broadcast that has lost its source, and for any beat where a character is stuck in a loop.

Avoid it where the screen has to communicate something. The recursion destroys legibility by the second level, so a display that carries information should not be the one doing this.

A kaleidoscope mirrors the frame outward into radial symmetry, and every segment sits at the same depth. Feedback repeats inward, and each copy is smaller and further away than the last.

The test is direction. Symmetry around a centre point is a kaleidoscope. A tunnel running away from you is feedback.

The model returns a person in front of an ordinary monitor. Say the repeat runs several levels deep and name a number, four or five, so the recursion is explicit.

The second failure is a clean stack that looks like nested rectangles in a graphics program. Ask for scan lines and for the colour to shift with each level, so the copies degrade the way a real signal does.