Last night I did visuals at Algorave Decelerate

Last night I did visuals at Algorave Decelerate for Pondskater. As I usually do, I used Picodevil, and the thing about Picodevil is that you need video clips to play with. I was thinking about the kind of mechanical, rhythmic movement of Pondskater's music, and about the focus on BPM that the event naturally calls to, and then I thought of Dina Kelberman's feature length film The Goal Is To Live.

Which is a beautiful film which takes clips from the TV show How It's Made, and decontextualises them - moving between clips according to a logic of colour or similarity, visual similarities rather than showing a process from end to end. I love this kind of factory footage, and this shows it in a beautiful way.

So I used it! I ripped it from Vimeo, and I ran a script through to detect the cuts, and then one to reject all the cuts which had fades happening. And then I watched through a bunch of them, and found myself thinking about the few that had hands doing something in them. So I went further through and picked out those, and categorised the hand clips by category:

• pushing a button
• turning a dial
• tying a knot
• pulling a lever
• "miscelaneous"
• placing objects or substances
• taking objects or substances
• demonstrating objects or substances to the camera
• mixing or shuffling objects or substances in place

These are all the things it's possible to do with your hands, it turns out.

Here's some favourite clips:

Anyway, I didn't record the set, but lots of people told me it was good. I was focusing on playing with the rhythm of the clips, doing a bunch of splice/slice type stuff, sometimes using echoWith and index().tile() to show the same clips offset in time. I've been tentatively doing some breakbeat type stuff in Strudel recently, and I think that's come back into my visuals. I also think my set was good!

But that's really a sidenote from the main point of this post. Which is that you should watch "The Goal Is To Live". Here it is again: