FOTO: © Michael Valiquette

Spaceship Earth 2.0

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

Astral travel with Cybotron into the meta-narrative of the Parallel Shift, a new sonic fiction that raises many questions about military science of the near-future and the possibility of other worlds.

The Rhythmanalyst (aka DeForrest Brown, Jr.) with Cybotron, Parallel Shift (Tresor, 2024)

Rhythmanalytics is a work-in-progress, diagnostic exploration of electronic music at the end of the music industry. DeForrest Brown, Jr. draws inspiration from conversations with techno originator Juan Atkins during the research and development phase of the 21st Century revival of the Cybotron project in collaboration with Berlin club/record label, Tresor—progressing techno beyond the dancefloor into an applied rhythmanalytical metaphilosophy. Rhythmanalytics maps the writings of philosopher Henri Lefebvre onto a timeline of the global techno economy and asks what happens to the once utopian, prosumer ideals of counter/cyberculture during an epochal transition from accelerationism to longtermism? The project unfolds across three separate events at transmediale, the festival acting as an infrastructure for Brown, Jr. to further develop Rhythmanalytics as the artist and thinker shapes the work into a forthcoming album and book supported by EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).

The cover of Cybotron’s debut album Enter (1983) depicts a body being digitised mid-stride; visualizing the beginnings of a potential philosophy imagined by a precocious young Juan Atkins with guidance from Vietnam war veteran Rik Davis, who together sought to transmit auditory portals into an alternate reality they called “the Grid” directly into the “Alleys of Your Mind.” Cybotron—a portmanteau of cyborg and cyclotron (an atomic particle accelerator)—was the first of a series of coded terms of “technospeak” shared between Atkins and Davis that formed the basis of an ongoing understanding of post-industrial/information-age capitalist realism within a techgnostic exotheology. “The purpose was simple,” Davis once said in the book Techno Rebels (1999). For him, the project of Cybotron was a way “to survive when the vultures and thieves came to take away what I had inserted into the cultural matrix!” Similarly, Atkins, quoted in Techno Rebels, expresses that he felt that “the US government always tells people what to think about and seems to cover up the existence of UFOs.” He found this systematic control over information exchange to be a form of thought control—“taking away people’s hope so that they don’t look towards the future.” In envisioning an alternate future scenario, Rhythmanalytics seeks to dismantle the rave communal industrial standard of the hardcore continuum and construct a myth-scientific modal logic that embraces cross-disciplinary multitasking in search of an empirical understanding of amplified “synoptic audio.”

Brown, Jr.’s workshop Spaceship Earth 2.0 proposes a reading group and discussion space rooted in the themes of his 2022 book Assembling a Black Counter Culture and his forthcoming work, Rhythmanalytics. By combining the thought processes of Buckminster Fuller and Sun Ra, two visionary thinkers whose approach to the concept of “Spaceship Earth” introduced a methodology and worldview that sees potential technical creativity that is especially accessible in music, Brown, Jr., will lead a focus group that will question how particular artists and institutions have (self)appointed themselves to ‘saving’ the techno legacy amid a looming “post-democratic rave new world.” As an output of this critique, the session will build ideas around platform-based vs institution-based cultural organisation.

Preisinformation:

Workshop regular: 20:00€ Workshop reduced 1: 15:00€ Workshop reduced 2: 18:00€

Location

silent green Gerichtstr. 35 13347 Berlin

Organizer

transmediale e.V. Berlin

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