MusicMakers Hacklab 2014 - DIY Utopia

2014’s MusicMakers Hacklab asked: What happens when past and future collide, when the artist and technologist merge into a single hand shaping sound? A century ago, Generation Z’s modernists imagined this moment - a time when image, media, and machine would bleed together into new forms of expression. This Hacklab became a site of reconnection, where analogue ghosts and early electronic experiments were not just remembered but reawakened. Participants were invited to splice rediscovered techniques with digital processes still finding their shape, letting past signals resonate inside the Now in a live dialogue with history, tuned to the frequencies of the Generation Z: ReNoise exhibition.

This Hacklab edition was co-hosted by Darsha Hewitt and Peter Kirn, and housed at the Native Instruments Office in Berlin. The finale performance took place at HAU2. Five public Hacklab Input talks rounded out the lab's activities: »Shaping the Future of Digital DJing« by DJ Shiftee and Friedemann Becker, »Designing Musical Evolution: User-centric process and research« by Florian Grote, »n_Polytope – Synthesis of Light and Sound in Time and Space« by Marije Baalman and Thomas Spier, »Probing the Past: A Media Archaeology of Handmade Electronic Sound« by Derek Holzer and Macumbista, and »RA Exchange« with Will Lynch and Robert Henke.

• Darsha Hewitt
• Peter Kirn