The Dial-a-View
The Dial-a-View is a live visuals system that I'm building to accompany ambient music. It lets you use a gamepad to scroll very, very slowly across satellite images of different parts of the world. You can drift in any compass direction, rotate, zoom in and out, and use a handful of different transition styles to jump between locations.
I don't think I'm alone in losing hours scrolling around random places in Google Earth - following tyre tracks through the Sahara, or a lone road across a tiny island in the South Atlantic. The Dial-a-View is an attempt to turn that experience into something I can share with other people, like DJing satellite images.
It got its first outing on 4 September 2026 at the Pixlar o Ljud showcase at Hypnos Theatre in Malmö, where I was partnered up with Paul Khadra and his ambient music. It was my first time performing at one of our showcases rather than just organising them.
The route was improvised on the night, but with a rough plan: start with images so abstract you wouldn't know you were looking at satellite imagery, move through landscapes that looked like biology slides, then to dense, urban cities, and finally to places that demonstrated human impact on the environment. I ended on a big, zoomed-out pan over Lebanon, where Paul is from. The idea was to make people curious about the world, but also remind them of the damage we're doing to it.
The locations were chosen with the help of a friend, and live in a Google Shet. It's currently around 35 places long, but I'm expanding it all the time. Some we picked because they're cool and abstract, some because they look like something else (river systems/veins, a Chinese district that looks like a computer chip), and some because they show extreme human influence on the landscape.
Under the hood, it's Mapbox GL JS's label-free satellite imagery running on a local web server, pulled into Touchdesigner, which handles all the motion, transitions and image effects. Most of the engineering effort went into smoothing out judder at very slow pan speeds, which turns out to be surprisingly tricky.
The name? It comes from "Miner at the Dial-a-View", a track on Grandaddy's album The Sophtware Slump. An old favourite.