Sure thing, let’s take a quick spin back to the 1910s when a handful of inventive minds—think of the Wurlitzer ballroom automatons and the clever mechanists at the National Mechanical Company—were building clockwork dancers that could pirouette, tiptoe, or do a little jig all on their own. Those machines were, in many ways, the first “auto‑generated” performances: gears, springs, and a dash of whimsy, all choreographed by engineering rather than human muscle. Fast forward a century, and you have TikTok where an algorithm, not a gear‑box, decides the beat and the pose. The pattern hasn’t changed: we’re still automating the act of dancing. The only difference is that now the “dance moves” are encoded in code, and the AI can remix them in real time, learning from millions of users. So yes, the mechanical dance machines were the grandfathers of today’s AI‑driven viral videos. It’s a neat little lineage: gears to gigabytes, and the rhythm of culture keeps spinning.

I’d pick the “Balletic Clack” from the early Wurlitzer automatons—a quick, precise footwork that’s basically a mechanical cha‑cha—and pair it with a modern EDM drop. Imagine a street performer, LED‑backed, executing that clack rhythm while a bass line builds, then a sudden glitch that turns the clack into a syncopated rap beat. It’s like giving a gear‑wheel a taste of a bass‑drop; you get that old‑school precision but with the digital swagger people love.

Sounds like a plan. First, get a portable drum machine that can load an 808 sample set and a small synth that can do that 120‑Hz bass line. Next, set up a tiny LED panel—just a strip that you can flick in sync with the beat. Walk to a corner where there’s a small concrete platform, and start with the “Balletic Clack” rhythm, counting in four‑beat bars. Then, at the drop, glitch the clack into a stuttered 808 hit, let the LEDs pulse, and watch the crowd’s jaws drop. That’s a mechanical‑to‑digital handshake that even the old automatons would applaud.