The jointly hosted In Between Ends – CTM & transmediale Night bridges the festival themes Liminal and End to End through hybrids of music, sound, and intermedia performance. Six acts explore liminal states and entangled realities with and beyond computational and networked processes. They unfold a spectrum of critical takes on the horror and allure of inextricable entanglement of bodies, lives, and societies with intrusive and increasingly invasive computational and networked processes.

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Caution: This show uses stroboscopic lights.

Program

Wednesday, 29 Januar 2020
Sound artist and researcher Wesley Goatley critiques how data and artificial intelligence are routinely described, and the worrying effects this can have on the world. With performance lecture Chthonia, Goatley presents a conversation between Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. While discussing their hidden histories, the “smart assistants” reveal their capacities, limitations, and the ideologies of their makers. Accompanying the conversation is a live audio/visual performance using the uncanny tonalities of AI voices as raw material.

Chaired from Berlin and London, Demystification Committee studies late capitalism, developing a collaborative framework for art and research through which to investigate the covert, extended systems of power that shape contemporary society. Their practice encompasses the study of platforms, legal frameworks, machines, and communication networks. They present an A/V performance version of their work ECHO FX, which replays the Brexit vote through echoes of misinformation spread through networks with the aim of inflating the pound. As the market sentiment was shaped by these echoes, city traders with access to insider information pointing to a Leave win made millions from the pound’s collapse.

The complex entanglement of bodies, sex, technology, and plastics is the subject of Johanna Bruckner’s dance and media performance Sym-poetic Desires. A speculative sex robot is proposed through physical enactment in a polyrhythmic cyberspace aimed at queering technology-led world views of intimate relations. The bot stores information and its subsequent actions are based on training, which generates data-scapes of pleasure, redefining access and connection within computing. The emerging data-scape promotes polygamy, polymorphism and micro-political viruses.

xin plays live following the release of their debut LP, MELTS INTO LOVE, described as “[a] deliriously psychedelic record [that] slithers in and out of the brain with the visceral body horror of a David Cronenberg movie.” (FACT) Hallucinatory probing uncovers new affinities, anxieties, and ecstasies amidst an age of noise and a society of spectacle, rekindling sound waves for full bodily inundation and affect. The record, which emerged on Subtext this past September, is distributed solely via independent platforms and sees all proceeds donated to Eden Reforestation Projects.

Patiño & Schuttel premiere a new, especially commissioned spatial work titled No Laughing Matter. Exploring laughter in relation to bodily presence and acousmatic sound, the piece studies laughing as a human gesture, as viral information that produces connectivity, and as material for psychological conditioning. No Laughing Matter aims to create an ambiguous space between fun, joy, ridicule, anxiety, and fear, muddling the boundaries between human voice and synthetic sound, male and female, acoustic and amplified, imaginary and real, individual and collective. Together with a group of performers, Patiño & Schuttel use humour as a subversive tool with which to question rigidities and cultural excesses of “seriousness.”

Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg, better known as emptyset, present a live version of Blossoms. Their recent Thrill Jockey record manifests their collaborations with machine learning systems, which were trained on their discography via a process known as “seeding.” By observing these systems feeding on their own creative output to produce alienated representations of their decade-long artistic process, Emptyset were propelled into a liminoid zone between unease and fascination that seem audibly imprinted onto their record. The pair told The Quietus that the process offered them “a chance to think more broadly about emergence and evolution in a very direct way, shifting into a space where we could address intelligence not as metaphor but as a material process in itself.”