"SPECTRAL" CTM festival
With an extensive program of concerts, discourses and an exhibition space, CTM.12 – Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Arts is appropriating the festival theme SPECTRAL to explore the current reemergence of all things ghostly and dark in experimental music, avant-pop, and art – and to speculate about its possible causes and inherent potentials.
As always, CTM's sister festival transmediale – festival for art and digital culture runs parallel to CTM at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). In 2012 the festival celebrates it's 25th anniversary. Together. CTM and transmediale constitute a unique event with huge international impact. The joint CTM and transmediale festival offers the most relevant and radically comprehensive review of how new technologies and digital culture are shaping today's world.
30 January – 5 February 2012
Various venues, Berlin
CTM Trailer from MFO on Vimeo.
Festival theme
A reversal is taking place on the fringes of today’s pop culture: drag, witch house, hypnagogic pop, hauntology, analog synthesizer music, neo-industrial, and drone music all focus on the energy of negativity and unconsciousness. Throughout these various styles one explores revisitations of past music and media and their unfulfilled utopias and dystopias, conjures eerie presences that rise from the deep material structures, and rejects the state of lively present with bitterness, euphoria or everything in between. Deceleration, decay, fumigation, noise, deformation, liquefaction, mystery, nostalgia, kitsch, emptiness, loss, withdrawal, the longing for transcendence, mundane alchemy, and xeno-communications are the buzzwords of an aesthetic that counters the relentlessness of hyper-capitalist production and its incessant demand for positive engagement. Parallels can be drawn to current protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Anonymous. In both cases, the avoidance of a positive alternative vision is formulated in an unsettling response to a confusing situation: Engagement that does not call for anything specific makes an essentially impossible demand, and thus poses what is perhaps the most radical challenge to the current social order.