Recent content on Phase Space
Your coding agent tells you the staging database moved to a new host last month. It didn’t. That was a plan someone reverted, and the agent doesn’t know it. The claim came from somewhere: a session back in March, a summary of a summary, an extraction pass that ran an LLM over your chat logs and wrote down whatever it decided mattered. Memory also gets written from what the agent reads.…
In 2007 I was the teaching assistant on a course at the San Francisco Art Institute. One assignment was a single sentence. Make something interesting using only materials within arm’s reach of where you are sitting. That meant the desk, the bag under your chair, your pockets. No studio, no budget, no trip to the store. A laptop already open in front of you counted, and so did a recorder you…
In 2006 I made a two-channel video. The first channel is a pair of hands resting in a lap, unbound. In the second, the same hands are tied. Neither one holds its state. Neither one ends. I called it The Constant Battle Against Self-Constraints (an endless loop) . The Constant Battle Against Self-Constraints (an endless loop), 2006. Two-channel video, shown here at native resolution.
A student at Bennington was making a film about a breakup. Her first version was careful and controlled: close-ups of objects, slow movements through her apartment, camera on her face. For the second version I gave her a constraint. Nothing above the waist. She argued with it. Then she shot three minutes of feet, hers and her ex-partner’s, moving across a kitchen floor in overlapping…
In 2006 I made a video called The Constant Battle Against Self-Constraints (an endless loop) . Two channels, side by side. On the left, hands unbound, resting in a lap. On the right, the same hands tied at the wrist with gaffer’s tape and muslin strips. But it doesn’t stay that way. The left channel slowly ties its own hands. The right, playing in reverse, ends up free. Then they swap…
“Let me tell you, my good friend…” If you’ve built LLM-powered NPCs, you’ve heard this. Your character starts strong, maybe even impressive. But by turn 20, something’s wrong. They’re repeating themselves. The same phrases. The same gestures. The same rhythm. I ran 150 turns of dialogue with an LLM-powered character last week: Pattern Frequency…
In Part 1 , I recognized the parallel: my nervous system (after developmental trauma and Complex PTSD) was experiencing timebase error. Perfectly functional responses clocked against old threats instead of present safety. Recognition changes your relationship to symptoms. But recognition alone doesn’t regulate a nervous system. You still need a stable reference to re-clock against. Building…
I learned about timebase correctors doing post-production work. Years later, during deep therapy and meditation retreat work, I saw the connection. The problem is always the same: the signal has lost its relationship to a stable reference. In video, it’s called timebase error. In trauma, it’s autonomic dysregulation. Both systems generate perfectly functional responses to the wrong…
Paul Kyle Faculty and Lead Technical Specialist, Post Production at CalArts School of Film/Video since 2010. Digital video since 1995. MFA San Francisco Art Institute. I teach editing, color grading, and post-production. I developed winter session courses on AI and the Moving Image. Before CalArts, I spent a decade in NYC post-production and co-founded a digital media startup. Along the way I…