MusicMakers Hacklab 2020 - Shapeshifters

2020's Hacklab focused on how performance practice and invention can change the performer—making them someone or something else, making them newly visible, or making them entirely invisible. Liminality is the possibility of transformation, ritual unbecoming. We challenged our participants to engage in collaborations that remake one another’s onstage roles. These ranged high tech to low tech, speculative to punk, involving projection, puppetry, prosthetic and makeup, in instruments that reshaped their bodies and voices, and in the metamorphic power of sound itself. But as always, those methods were drawn from learning from and working with one another, and in this year’s edition specifically, challenged us to swap our usual skills and masks with our fellow experimenters.

This Hacklab edition was co-hosted by Tad Ermitaño and Peter Kirn, and housed at radialsystem in Berlin, with the finale performance taking place there as well. Three public Hacklab Input talks rounded out the lab's activities: »Notes Toward an Animist Technology« by Tad Ermitaño, »Inside "CBM 8032 AV"« by Robert Henke with Anna Tskhovrebov, and »Shapeshifters. Performance Personas, Transformation, and Power« with Bora and Eric D Clark in conversation with Peter Kirn.

• Peter Kirn
• Tad Ermitaño

Presented with CDM, Nusasonic, and the SHAPE platform, which is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Funded by the Senate Department of Culture and Europe, and Initiative Musik.