Transmediale and CTM 2024: wafts of fog and Big Tech

There may have been a lot of simmering behind the scenes – but there was no sign of a bad mood in the Silent Green’s underground concert hall last Friday. This year’s edition of the CTM festival for electronic and experimental music started here in Berlin’s Wedding with a concert by the Swedish musician Anna von Hausswolff.

Israel’s war against Hamas had previously also shaken up this corner of the cultural scene: more than a dozen artists from abroad had withdrawn their commitments to the CTM in protest against the Berlin Senate’s planned anti-Semitism clause. The clause that would have required recipients of public funding to take a stand against anti-Semitism was ultimately overturned due to legal concerns – but the international “Strike Germany” campaign continues to gain momentum. She calls for a boycott of German cultural institutions because they are allegedly too Israel-friendly.

The CTM audience, on the other hand, is obviously not boycotting anything – at least the hall is well filled. Paddy Shine and Phil Masterson from the Irish folk project Moundabout perform a few popular hits before leaving the Swede on stage as the main act of the evening. She sings and screams melodramatically into the microphone; Around them, clouds created by fog machines create a well-calculated, ethereal, dark atmosphere. Von Hausswolff, who has been in the music business since the early 2010s, describes her sonic products as “funeral pop,” and critics have compared her to Kate Bush. Instead, because of the voice, I have more associations with Björk, whose artistic repertoire is of course somewhat more diverse than that of von Hausswolff.

Two days later, back in Silent Green. Australian-Icelandic musician Ben Frost brings a live performance to the stage together with Greg Kubacki, guitarist of US math/metalcore band Car Bomb, and Dutch audiovisual software artist Tarik Barri. While Frost tinkers with sound machines and Kubacki works on his string instrument, Barri creates psychedelic-abstract light projections for the wall behind the stage.

The volume is deafening: thumping beats meander through the room, the floor vibrates and those standing on it vibrate with it. Everything is a resonance body. However, not much happens. Sound surfaces push into each other, tension builds until – as is usual in the club context, but also in classical and pop music – there is at some point a release, a harmonic resolution. A foreseeable orgasm, so to speak. The audience stands reverently in the room. This evening doesn’t seem particularly “adventurous” either, i.e. risky in the sense that something unexpected would happen – which may be a bit disappointing given that the CTM subtitles itself “Festival for Adventurous Music and Art”.

However, the claim to avant-garde seems to have degenerated into a mere gesture here – not surprising, after all, the pioneering self-image has been one of the well-marketed “location advantages” of the capital, which still presents itself as young and hip, for decades. The logic of the culture industry, if one follows Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, is the predictable reproduction of the same thing – which, however, is advertised to consumers using terms that are intended to indicate novelty. If the CTM really wanted to be as “adventurous” as it claims to be, it might have to break with the predictable darkness, the predictable fog, the predictable fonts and graphic designs on the predictable posters that announce the quite predictable sounds. (But it should be noted that this is only a momentary impression – other acts such as the US musician Kim Ann Foxman on Friday in the Panorama Bar promise at least great dancing fun.)

The opening event of the Transmediale – festival for media art and digital culture, from which the CTM developed in 1999 and with which it still cooperates today – is more lively. Cory Doctorow, Canadian blogger and science fiction author, explains the principle of “enshittification” of the Internet at the Canadian Embassy as part of the annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture – a term he uses has shaped itself in recent years. By this, Doctorow means the gradual loss of quality of social media, which comes about because they first exploit their users and then their business customers in order to ultimately pocket all the profits themselves.

Doctorow then discusses the possibilities of a free internet that serves people with tech policy researcher Frederike Kaltheuner. Through “interoperability” – the ability of platforms to interact with one another – users should be able to take back the Internet and break the monopoly of all-powerful tech companies. Especially in Germany, Doctorow emphasizes, “Big Tech” is still treated as a niche topic, but there is an urgent need for action. We agree with this – and in this sense we hope that Transmediale, as a discussion platform, can advance the debates about political dealings with the corporations that dominate the Internet. After all, they are responsible for the toxic dynamics that social media leads us to and to which the festival wants to focus attention under this year’s motto “you’re doing amazing sweetie.”

Incidentally, the Transmediale also had to accept a few cancellations due to the Israel War, and was understanding: “We respect this decision and are in close contact with the artists,” said a statement from the festival.

On the way home from the Canadian Embassy, ​​I walk past my neighbor’s studio. He listens to Aphex Twin while he paints. The acid smacks drive the track forward. Very different sounds mix together, creating a somehow torturous, yet blissful state. Is this high art? In any case, more happens in a minute in this music than in a few hours in Silent Green, that’s safe to say. I enter the title of the track I think I recognized into Google: »Lisbon Acid« was published in 2005. But it still sounds like avant-garde.

Both festivals run until the end of this week. The full program and venues can be found at www.transmediale.de respective www.ctm-festival.de