programme (pdf) ECAS WP 2 - Stage

»FUTURESHOCK«
08.10. - 16.10.2011 / Krakow, Poland

This year’s theme, “Future Shock,” is borrowed from the prophetic and best-selling 1970 book by Alvin Toffler, which described the disorienting effects of accelerated technological and social change. Confronted with an unprecedented sense of information overload, many artists reach backward, sideways and forward to re-imagine the future from the vantage point of the past, filtered through the present via outmoded technologies or disjointed contexts.

Do they do this to escape a transient now of over-abundance, where the future is less a world of hope and promise, as it once was, than a frightening place? Are artists trading digital means for vintage analogue equipment because they are afraid computers have a life of their own, one that disembodies us and constrains the way music sounds?

Some in this year’s program capture the sense of a world ending, systems collapsing. Others use sound to explore deep, personal channels of memory, or draw us into contemplative stability zones. Some fly into sci-fi realms inspired by film and literature, from the fantastic and visionary to the bleak. Then there are those who strive to unshackle themselves from the past entirely, in search of the unknown. We’ve included legendary names whose influence reverberates through the decades, via their use of technology in music: Morton Subotnick, Chris & Cosey, John Foxx, Model 500. These figures lie at the core of Unsound 2011, artists who have charted ways into the future. The Internet fuels an evermore frenzied search for the new via breathless blogs and sharing technologies, an embodiment of Toffler’s 1970 prediction of how art would also be affected by accelerated change. It may be that the rapid replication of sounds ultimately impinges upon invention, or perhaps ideas now being tracked evolve into styles we cannot yet imagine. So let’s meet again in 2030 or so (hopefully not from an apocalyptic wasteland) and decide: what did the future really sound like in 2011? Will artists then be reaching back into a past that reached into a past for inspiration, turning music into a never-ending hall of mirrors? Time will tell.

For now: welcome to Unsound “Future Shock.”