  A nonlinear optical medium results by the collective orientation of liquid
crystal molecules tightly coupled to a transparent photoconductive layer. We
show that such a medium can give a large gain, thus, if inserted in a ring
cavity, it results in an unidirectional optical oscillator. Dynamical regimes
with many interacting modes are made possible by the wide transverse size and
the high nonlinearity of the liquid crystals. We show the generation of
spatiotemporal pulses, coming from the random superposition of many coexisting
modes with different frequencies.
