After four days at the Old Hairdressers, where a wonderfully canny variety of live performances, film and visual art was shoe-horned into spaces where the artists were all within an arm's length (at most) from the audience, Buzzcut changed gear and location on Sunday.

From early until late, the Glue Factory's dark caverns and empty side rooms – even outdoors areas – hosted the kind of installations and durational work that wouldn't have fitted in at the Old Hairdressers. It was here the full scope and ambition of Rosana Cade and Nick Anderson's Buzzcut endeavour, pulled together in weeks in response to the absence of New Territories, emerged triumphant.

Glue Factory is one of those dankly disused industrial spaces that can't help but filter in a haunted context for whatever is staged there. So when Murray Wason launched into his solo durational performance, invoking a being that was The Automaton, the site felt eerily appropriate. With Kraftwerk as a backdrop, Wason – in brisk white work clothes – used hand-crafted puppet play and found objects in vignettes that explored humanity from the perspective of machines.

At times his own body became a screen for videos of whirling cogs, projected specifically where a human heart would be. Do machines have the edge? The final moments heard Wason shouting: "He can't do this! Or this!" and exploding into an exuberant hoorah dance for humanity and its capacity for deregulated spontaneity. Beautifully thought through and superbly presented.

Thomas McCulloch's scratch performance set a series of actions among rusting machinery. His imagery is both delicate and abrasive: little wibbly jellies – and the tiny clockwork toys inside – end up splatted, as does the raw liver that weeps blood from between his mangling hands.

It's visual haiku: your own mind will deliver details of wasted lives, destruction, brutality – maybe even animal welfare and glue – in response to McCulloch's pungent provocations.

The same space saw Laura Bradshaw leading audience members in a shared ritual of dance as twilight fell.

Elsewhere performers – Paul Henry, Greg Sinclair among them – put bodies and intellect on the line in work that dug into what shapes a sense of self, and what can dislocate that fragile state of mind. The building was alive with artworks that defied the chill of the economic climate, as well as the spaces.

The soup was, similarly, spiced and enlivening. Fingers crossed now for Buzzcut 2013.

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