Creamcake

23.–25.11. / HAU2

HAU Hebbel am Ufer is the central venue for the third edition of the 3hd festival. The programme offers a platform for an aspiring generation of artists who deal with new technologies in music and art, thematizing the central changes in the digital world. It gathers projects from the intersections of avant-garde, pop, performance, and the visual arts, this year focusing on the interplay of visibility, pain, feminism, empowerment, and community.  

www.3hd-festival.com

Exhibition “Whatever You Thought, Think Again”

Thursday, November 23 & Friday, November 24, 6-10pm, 
Saturday, November 25, 3-10pm

Participants: Anja Kaiser, Anna Willert, Cleo Kempe Towers, Jenna Sutela, Johanna Odersky, i.ruuu, Magdalena Bichler, M.E.S.H., Stellan Veloce and Neo Hülcker, and Tabita Rezaire

The “Whatever You Thought, Think Again” group exhibition is closely linked to the theme of 3hd Festival 2017 in title and approach. Coming from a critical and curious perspective on the collective
 contemporary moment, ideas around body politics, emotional labour and visibility are envisioned and enacted outside of the status quo, opening us up to possible new realities.

Featuring video, sound and sculpture by Anja Kaiser, Jenna Sutela, Johanna Odersky, Magdalena Bichler, M.E.S.H. and Tabita Rezaire, the show also includes performances by Neo Hülcker and
Stellan Veloce and i.ruuu, as well as an interactive installation by Cleo Kempe Towers and a survey developed by 3hd in cooperation with Anna Willert.  Otherwise known as Emotional Labour Queen, Kempe Towers’ “Matters of the Heart” creates a space for confession in private and group sessions with the writer and artist, while Hückler and Veloce’s “Ear Action” collaboration explores the space between listening and feeling through one-on-one performances. Meanwhile, Berlin-based physician Willert’s “Tell Us How You Really Feel” research project examines media and technology engagement, economic status, personal attitudes, and its relationship to mental well-being in a survey that can be filled out online for the duration of the exhibition.

Elevator Piece
James Whipple (M.E.S.H.)
“Elevator Piece” will be presented as part of the “Whatever You Thought, Think Again” 3hd exhibition. Based around the auditory illusion of a pitch that continually moves upwards or downwards but ultimately seems to get no higher or lower, James Whipple (a.k.a. M.E.S.H.)’s “Elevator Piece” explores the Shepard tone, used in composition and digital signal processing. This effect of creating a perpetually increasing tension through layered rising tones is a popular part of the spectacular arsenal of modern cinema. It can arouse feelings of awe and unease, even a sense of hallucinatory anxiety more powerful than any mere plot point or character.

Voicing Resistance 

Farai, Lyra, Abyss X with Maria Skoula
Friday, November 24, 9pm-midnight / HAU2

For “Voicing Resistance”, Farai, Lyra, and Abyss X with Maria Skoula, use their voices as instruments for effecting change and confrontation as part of the 3hd program. These three outstanding artists and collaborations will respond to and resist contemporary systems of oppression by triggering their audience’s minds on an auditory and emotional level. 

This multiplicity of voices will explore their potential as a weapon and an activist practice, where expression and enunciation give form to contemporary realities, as well as possible futures. 3hd invites you to reflect on how what we sing can create community and transform the world.
 

XHOIR

Workshop by Colin Self
Friday, November 24, 4-6 pm / HAU2

Berlin-based performance artist and musician Colin Self and 3hd invite you to participate in the group singing workshop XHOIR. Shifting between performance and music, Self’s work explores themes of the physicality of the voice, cognitive relationships, and active listening as a tool in community engagement. His project for 3hd highlights the need for a community-oriented approach to everyday life in a digital age of alienation, while applying to be a voice of change.

3hd Survey: Tell Us How You Really Feel

In collaboration with Anna Willert
Saturday, November 25, 4-5 pm / HAU2

Everyone now has the chance to participate in our “Tell Us How You Really Feel” survey, realized by 3hd in cooperation with physician and prospective psychiatrist Anna Willert. Investigating the impact of media and technology engagement on mental health, the project asks: How does a flexible, and digitized lifestyle make us feel in today's information society?
3hd proposes that psychological well-being is a social act, and therefore a political, rather than a personal issue. The survey examines the impact of networks, information circulation and the internet, as well economic status and personal attitudes on our lives in the age of digital capitalism.
There will be an additional panel about the survey and its discursive framework together with Cleo Kempe Towers, Anna Willert, and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah.

Lecure and Panel: Body, Technology, Politics

Anja Kaiser, Robin Buckley, Gala Rexer. Moderation: Sebastian Dürer
Saturday, November 24, 5.30pm

For the “Body, Technology, Politics” panel, 3hd presents three different perspectives on the body, inside out and outside in. Using these bodies as instruments for reflecting on the power structures underlying the ways in which technology influences our physical presence, participants Robin Buckley, Anja Kaiser and Gala Rexer will share strategies of differentiation and resistance.
 
Robin Buckley explores the politics and aesthetics of queerness and technology in his lecture performance “Queer Plastic.” Starting with Heather Davis' research on ‘The Queer Futurity of Plastic,’ the London-based sound artist examines this malleable synthetic compound through a sonic materiality and sociality, seeking non-normative possibilities moving forward. Working with several collaborators, including Swan Meat and Anna Sadlon, the demonstration moves between electroacoustic composition, pop, spoken word and ambient textures.
 
Anja Kaiser presents her long term project "Sexed Realities – To Whom Do I Owe My Body?," which aims to unravel the visible and invisible forces underlying the rendering, replication and acceleration of bodies, mapping the battlefield of power and pleasure and its effect on us in normative societies. Through various media, her work investigates the existing surfaces of projection, exploring the fate of biological determinism and the limitation of deconstruction. “Sexed Realities” is part of the 3hd group exhibition “Whatever You Thought, Think Again” at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, along with a new online commission called “By(e) Default.”
 
Currently a PhD candidate at Humboldt University in Berlin, sociologist and journalist Gala Rexer will share her ongoing studies on “Biopolitics of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART).” In her talk, Rexer will trace back the history of ART as a feminist utopia, where gender (and reproduction) is uncoupled from biology through new technologies. As one of the key thoughts of cyberfeminism, this techno-positive desire has been challenged by the realities of neoliberalism and globalization.
 
The three lectures will be followed by a conversation between Kaiser, Buckley and Rexer, moderated by artist, writer and publisher Sebastian Dürer.
 

Meditation on Music

Green Music, Marta Forsberg
Saturday, November 25, 8pm / HAU2

How does listening affect us the way that watching affects us? 3hd presents composer Marta Forsberg and artist duo Green Music to perform at HAU. United by a deep devotion to improvisation, healing, and meditative music, the three participants will create intimate environments that a broadened perception and new musical imagination. Francesco Cavaliere and Tomoko Sauvageof Green Music are inspired by the work by the Fluxus artist and composer Henning Christiansen, playing with green sculptures and instruments made of a combination of mineral, glass, plants and painted synthesizers. Here, they are surrounded by a small collection of green curiosities: statuettes, clay, plants, oil and fluorescent elements. These small individual pieces become extraordinary talismans that boost their sound waves and underwater pendulums. 

Forsberg, on the other hand, explores darkness, light, and color in her compositions. Using LED light, fabric, sequins and minimalist drone-based electronic music, she explores the political aspect of visibility on stage as an artist, and the need to create your own space, loudly and visually. This will be the framework around a parallel reality, like walls of glass against the rest of the world. Here Forsberg can move freely, and invites the audience to move with her. Her performances stand for safety, space, rest, and glow. A room to embrace and rest in, where the only thing that exists is what is happening here and now.

This “Meditation on Music” event marks the last show of 3hd “Whatever You Thought, Think Again” at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, before we go on to dance at OHM after party