A two-night performance by Jennifer Walshe and Jon Leidecker. »MILLIONS OF EXPERIENCES (HUGE IF TRUE)« explores the paradoxes of scale in our current socio-economic environment. If the purpose of scale is to ensure costs remain low while growth is maximised, what is the opposite of scale? What could be made possible through unscaling? Walshe and Leidecker’s performance descales and unscales the technological processes at the core of their collaborative practices. Taking place on Feb 3rd and 5th with an ensemble of musicians, Walshe and Leidecker combine live voice, machine-made loops, AI-generated Enya, and an archive of voice samples to unsettle ideas of what is purely technological and purely human. On Sunday 5 Feb, Walshe and Leidecker bring this performance to a close with their epilogue, »MOREOVER,« an intimate performance that explores the idiosyncrasies of machine listening and digital sound while surfing the outer reaches of online culture. This event is not included in transmediale, CTM, or Connect passes – additional tickets must be purchased to attend.
transmediale and CTM will also meet in Berghain Säule for a programme which features a series of live sets somewhere between ritualistic noise, post-punk, digital deconstructions, and gabber, each with a unique performative edge that conjures portals to distinct worlds and fictions. The South Korean musician bela takes strong conceptual narratives to their works, as heard most recently through Guidelines, a release investigating Nongak, a traditional form of Korean folk music. Through a process of meticulously uncovering sheet music from government archives and ensemble performances on YouTube, bela has crafted an astonishing album of pulsing, splitting, time-warping music, rooted in a traditional past and yet entirely distinct from it. The duo Vieze Meisje bring pop, performance, humour, and rave in one dazzling act. Singer Maya Merten’s idiosyncratic poetry – heartwarmingly honest, hilariously funny and, at times, brutal – glides over the acrobatic beats and loops of producer Azertyklavierwerke. Donning pink hazmat suits, a noisy, industrial, femme waste removal service is performed by Dreamgirls (Clíona Ní Laoi and Michelle Doyle) who have come to clean up all the waste, spray disinfectant, and remove human stains. MusicMakers Hacklab co-host Verónica Mota appears as her Espectra Negra moniker, unfurling experimental, industrial, and ritualistic sonics between the Säule’s booming concrete pillars. Frequent CXEMA guest Jana Woodstock links the night’s sounds through wide-ranging interventions, pulling from her love of the many textures of music’s noisier and beat-propelled techno spectrum. This evening is included in all festival passes - CTM, transmediale, and Connect.
Both festivals close their 2023 together with a joint finale concert. Despite an always-growing fanbase, the duo Amnesia Scanner have managed to remain relatively enigmatic. Their trajectory has over the last years brought forth a steady string of digitally-grotesque, aesthetically-cryptic videos and releases that jolt bodies into irregular dancing action and carnivalize the present. Revealed through these strong aesthetics is a deep fascination with system vulnerabilities, informational overload, and sensory excess. Closing out the 2023 editions of transmediale and CTM, Amnesia Scanner will premiere their new work »strobe.rip« in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Freeka Tet. The combination of provocative aesthetics from two celebrated artistic projects fuses into an affecting narrative about isolation and survival within today’s collapsing ecosystems and information environments. At the core of their work is an interest in how the contemporary experience is mediated, including the ways in which listening to music and live performance is evolving as digital ecosystems are proliferating. With extremely detailed, 16k, fantasy vivid colours, and maximum texture, the concert will serve as the launch to a new collaborative body of work to be unleashed throughout 2023 via further live performances plus digital and physical releases on the lauded label PAN, in various formats.
Opening the night are Team Rolfes with »3-2-1 Rule,« a VR-puppeted, motion capture avatar-ed, mixed-reality narrative project that will appear in a live stage adaptation at CTM. Directed by Sam Rolfes and written by spam poet Jacob Bakkila, the story follows Eris Wonderful, a memory hunter gig worker in a near-future metaverse. This manic AV mashup of real-time 3D avatar theatre, metaverse-parody games features an original score by Galen Tipton, a half-sardonic digital slapstick, half-hyperpop scream ballad. This event is not included in transmediale, CTM, or Connect passes – additional tickets must be purchased to attend.
The participation of Tanat and Nuh Peace is supported by Goethe-Institut Thailand. The »CTM x transmediale Finale« is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Amnesia Scanner's »Strobe.rip« performance is supported by »dive in. Programme for Digital Interactions« of the German Federal Cultural Foundation with funding of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) through the »Neustart Kultur« programme. »MILLIONS OF EXPERIENCES (HUGE IF TRUE)« is made possible with friendly support by Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung and Culture Ireland.