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Shaking Chains release ever-changing algorithmic music video

By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 28 March 2017

Manchester band Shaking Chains have created an interesting video for their debut single, ‘Midnight Oil’. Using an algorithm to pull together clips of videos from around the internet, the video changes every time it is watched, never showing the same sequence of shots twice.

“‘Midnight Oil’ is an experiment in algorithmic filmmaking, whereby the hermetic structures of the pop video are corrupted”, explains the band’s Jack Hardiker, who created the video. “It generates a potentially infinite number of self-contained films from hijacked online video, to create a transitory snapshot of the world that alters with every play. The whole world plays director”.

He continues: “The raw footage is selected from an evolving set of search terms. The coding repurposes the same suggestive algorithms that inform how we consume music now. Here they cannot be ignored or silenced, but act independently. What emerges is a cacophony of footage, an exponential roar of possibilities where poignancy and nonsense become bedfellows”.

“Search terms offer the internet user a sense of stability and structure, building a parameter-fence to hold back the pandemonium”, he concludes. “Yet here they are hidden, and make their own choices: there is no accurate quantification that can be made, the extent of combinations remains unknown. What eventually comes into focus is a sense of the infinite, and a new way of generating meaning from these vast, ungainly archives of human experience”.

Watch the video and then watch a completely different one here.

You can catch the band live at The Islington in London tomorrow night.