Following the success of the inaugural 3hd Festival last year, Berlin-based event organisers, Daniela Seitz and Anja Weigl of Creamcake are happy to announce its second edition, running from October 11 to October 15. Happening at various venues in Berlin, including HAU Hebbel am Ufer, OHM, Vierte Welt and, of course, the Internet, 3hd is a new breed of hybrid festival, looking at music, performance, and art to ask deeper questions about politics, community, economic uncertainty, and communication.
In 2015, 3hd explored the paradoxes of the music industry of today and life under capitalism with the theme of ‘The Labor of Sound in a World of Debt’. It analyzed international developments in contemporary music culture, through presentations, panel discussions, exhibitions, music and video releases, and live performance.
[vimeo 156627557 w=620&h=300]Building on the themes of last year, 3hd’s 2016 program continues its interest in this realm to not simply question recent evolutions in visual and digital culture but also propose alternative collective horizons and movements, in the face of an increasingly complex and oppressive socio-political climate.
In selecting a statement, but also adding a question mark for this year’s theme ‘There is nothing left but the Future?’, 3hd Festival resists a trend towards speculating on the future, instead offering potential solutions for fixing the problems of the present. The five-day October program will interrogate this notion in a series of lectures, panels, workshops, live performances and commissions examining music and art at its intersection.
The festival carries on the original “label – magazine – festival” intention of its hybrid form by presenting works, artists and ideas online in the manner of essays, music releases and cross-platform video and animation projects. Music writer and academic Adam Harper, for example, opens the first artist announcement with an essay on “violent freedoms and violent oppressions”, within the bleak economic backdrop of Brexit-backed isolationism, and Trump-supported racism. Rianna Jade Parker explores the cultural, political and personal value and implication of our physical selves in her ‘Body in Context’ panel and Vika Kirchenbauer confronts normative modes of representation in relation to the exploitation of subcultures in a video installation.
During the days between October 11 to 15, there will also be performances, presentations, an exhibition, installations and discussions around these issues and ideas. But rather than focussing on the ‘full-stop’, dead-end of this accelerated globalization of violence aided by the internet, 3hd makes it a motion that’s still up for debate, a place with room for change.
Artist, producer and tea merchant TCF will present a workshop that encourages music production through collective thinking and technological progress, accompanied by a tea ceremony. Kara-Lis Coverdale explores the liberations of a post-instrumental world in two concerts, and online radio art project DIY Church will present an abstract symposium on social sculpture through sound and silence.
3hd aims to examines the role art and music plays in leading conversation the way we live and where we are going. The ‘sound of now’ might be the music of modems, always connected, always online, ever-confronted by precarity, uncertainty, anxiety, but where is your hope for the future?
For the detailled programme and line-up, have a look at the website: 3hd-festival.com
3HD Festival 2016 “There is nothing left but the future?”
Tuesday, 11th October – Sunday, 16th October 2016
Various locations | Berlin
