Buddy System
As I approached the venue, the bass leaked out onto the street, joined by the murmur of voices still waiting to enter and those cooling off under the night air. An exchange of hugs and tickets traded in for wristbands, I followed the sound indoors, stepping into shifting light. A loose knot of bodies had already gathered near the decks, weight shifting, limbs finding rhythm, calibrating to each other under the pull of sonic textures. The space glowed like it had just been plugged in: candy neon and electric. Sculptural panels hung to the side of the dancefloor, swaying overhead, refracting light and colour. It felt like dancing through a mobile — kinetic and deliberate, suspended in motion.
Behind the decks, a shifting field of projection pulsed with colour, caught in between states. The visuals were built from studio footage of Ally McLeod’s sculptural works — now suspended alongside the dance floor — interpreted through Anna Shkuratoff’s videography practice before the installation was brought into the party space. The resulting footage was then reimagined, live-mixed by $40 Lawn Chair (Jake Rusnak) and Shkuratoff, reforming the material in sync with the room’s sonic pulse. What landed on the screen was the result of a three-part translation, a kind of material memory shaped by layered handoffs between artists.
The sculptural panels themselves were hung low, cut from sheets of plastic that shimmered
and scattered light in motion. Art objects made to be moved with and moved through, they invited touch, proximity, and ambient attention. Drawn from the same forms, the projections didn’t mirror the installation but carried its imprint. Stretched and reshaped in rhythmic conversation with the sculptures through bursts of kinetic texture, they pulsed with the same responsive energy that flowed throughout the room. Within this space, time lost its edges — the original object, the lens’s distortion, the beat’s manipulation all unfolding inside the same glowing frame. What remained was a cycle of interpretation: material becoming memory, memory becoming movement.
The decks passed fluidly between DJs, breaking from the familiar back-to-back format in favour of a five-way handoff. Allbeings, Bronsön, HiROSE, VioletNoice and Xiumei each brought their own pulse, guiding the room through shifting terrains. With every selection offering a depth of textures to shape the ways we moved, the charm of B5B revealed itself as an exercise in timing and intuition — a responsive rhythm shaped as much from listening as from playing. Undulating and hypnotic, the set unfolded as a shared proposition formed through the interplay of collective intention.
Rhythm held the room together, first through sound, then through image, now through bodies echoing in sonic constellation. Between friends, movements traveled as a series of passed gestures — tried on, reshaped, and then returned. The room held an ease, a warmth and playfulness emerging to conspire with techno’s darker edges. As we settled deeper into motion, the sculptures, too, became points of contact. Hands reached out to spin panels of soft plastic, inviting them to join us in our movement. Touched and turned, the sculptures caught the light of their own distorted image as it returned in projection and scattered, dancing with us across the floor.
By the end of the night, everything had looped back on itself — gesture echoing sound, light echoing form, movement echoing movement. It was an environment built through collaboration, the kind that only emerges from many hands and minds moving together in vision and collision, ebbing and flowing in psychedelic pulsation. The night belonged to the movement between things: the shared shaping of space, sound, and attention.
In that way, Buddy System lived up to its name — not just a party thrown for people, but made with them.
What had been built in motion held its shape in memory. Walking back out into the night air, I felt it still trailing behind me — like a trace of something unfolding, still moving.