This document supplements an experimental Jitter / Max/MSP collection of
implementation patches that set its goal to simulate an alchemical process for
a person standing in front of a mirror-like screen while interacting with it.
The work involved takes some patience and has three stages to go through. At
the final stage the "alchemist" in the mirror wearing sharp-colored gloves (for
motion tracking) is to extract the final ultimate shining sparkle (FFT-based
visualization) in the nexus of the hands. The more the hands are apart, the
large the sparkle should be. Moving hands around should make the sparkle
follow. To achieve the desired visual effect and the feedback mechanism, the
Jitter lattice-based intensional programming model is used to work on
4-dimensional (A+R+G+B) video matrices and sound signals in order to apply some
well-known alchemical techniques to the video at real-time to get a mirror
effect and accompanying transmutation and transformation stages of the video
based on the stability of the sound produced for some duration of time in
real-time. There is an accompanying video of the result with the interaction
with the tool and the corresponding programming patches.