Over the last breathless autumn months, we have been following pandemic news, attempting to adapt and learn from ongoing trials and discussions within cultural communities, exchanging ideas with artists and actors in the music world, and sharing moments of hope, uncertainty, and disappointment together with everyone. It seems that there is still a long way to go, in terms of navigating and emerging from the pandemic with a transformed personal and collective vision/strength. With the »Transformation« theme CTM 2021 hopes to contribute to ongoing critical reflections and encourage artistic experimentation that could lead us to new and better practises.
In response to ongoing uncertainty and the likelihood of intensifying restrictions in wintertime, the shape of CTM 2021 will relax and expand beyond the festival’s usual 10 days. Music, exhibition, and discourse events will take place in mostly online formats around the core dates of 19 – 31 January 2021, overlapping into February. For the first time, the festival will also present a follow-up group of events in the second half of 2021. But before all of this, CTM Festival will kick-off with two workshop series that aim to address the theme of Transformation in different ways.
At a time when touring and in-person performance opportunities remain extremely limited, the new series A2A Transmission offers six knowledge-sharing workshops from artists to artists, addressing a variety of skills and fields of music and providing intimate sessions for exchange between practitioners. Topics ranging from the basics of mastering and methods of music creation using machine learning or pulsar synthesis techniques, to exploring approaches to dismantle Western bias in digital and electronic music production tools, and more are explored by AYA, Interspecifics, James Ginzburg (Emptyset), Khyam Allami, Marcin Pietruszewski, Queer Ear Mastering in December 2020. Workshop tickets are now available.
A series of four workshops will follow mid-January 2021 under the banner of our ongoing series, Rethinking Music Ecosystems, which since 2019 has brought together artists, organisers, activists, thinkers, promoters, and listeners alike to speculate on what a more collaborative, equitable, and interdependent music ecosystem might look like, and how we might work towards one. Led by musician and media theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr.; Jay Jordan and Jack Jordan, respectively co-founder of the artistic activist group »Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination« (Labofii) and independent musician; rave, psychedelia, and counterculture explorer Michelle Lhooq; and Taeyoon Choi, an artist, educator, and School for Poetic Computation co-founder; these workshops aim to offer a series of speculative exercises in Transformation that hone-in on specific topics with the goal of responding to current problematic working models and conditions, and finding potential responses and resources with which to challenge and improve them. An open call to interested participants is out now.
We are also pleased to announce the programme for the 2021 Research Networking Day (RND) edition, which will take place 23 January 2021 online. RND 2021 will discuss aspects of transformation within posthuman sound, tradition, storytelling, and magic. Hosted by Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and the German Association for Music Business and Music Culture Research, RND provides an exchange platform for students and researchers from different graduate and postgraduate programmes traversing the fields of audio, arts, media, design, and related theoretical disciplines.
A2A Transmission, Rethinking Music Ecosystems, and Research Networking Day each offer different ways to engage with questions of Transformation. They each harness or explore the power of art and music to amplify a multitude of voices and provide a laboratory in which we can imagine alternative practices. Art and music have always aimed at transformation, reshaping forms, experiences, practices, identities, and collectivity. Yet, music and art worlds must also ask themselves how inequality and exploitation are inscribed in their own structures. How can we work towards a music scene in which opportunities for design, representation, and earnings are fairly distributed? How can we use our work to strengthen mutual concern and the common good instead of remaining steadfast in internalised individualised competition? How can we recognise our differences and develop new ways of being together, despite many existing injuries and divides?
Such questions and more inform CTM 2021’s music programme, special commissions, exhibition activities, and further discourse series events, which will be announced in part in December. In the meantime, be sure to sign up to the CTM newsletter or CTM Telegram channel to stay informed.