Creamcake 3hd 2022

As part of their festival 3hd 2022, Creamcake is a guest at Berlinische Galerie with the film programme "Deep Thought". This year’s programme refers to the comedy science-fiction franchise "The Hitchhiker‘s Guide to the Galaxy" (H2G2) by Douglas Adams from 1978. There’s a supercomputer in H2G2 that’s been programmed to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question, from which 3hd 2022 takes its theme: "Life, the Universe, and Everything." The aforementioned second greatest data processor in the cosmos (Earth, as it turns out, is the first) threatens the very livelihood of those intellectual labourers who spend their lives contemplating existence. And so, representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and “other professional thinking persons” disrupt the risk of a final resolution by demanding "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty" and threatening to go on strike. That’s where Creamcake’s "Deep Thought" film programme comes in, named after the offending artificial intelligence – with its foreboding finality – and screening online, at Berlinische Galerie and at 3hdTV from October 21 to November 21.

4 films by 4 artists

Four films by four artists broadly examine notions of life on earth and interstellar imaginaries, from the globalized connectivity of trade routes to the terraforming of other planets.

There’s Shuang Li’s fictionalized account of a French mother and young Chinese yellow vest factory worker, involved in the production of a ubiquitous symbol of industry distributed worldwide, while Agnieszka Polska presents a poetic collage of stock videos reflecting on notions of everyday life, inspired by a 1990 experiment to test conducted by the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. Alice Bucknell’s 3D-animated work of world-building, AI, and speculative fiction investigates and critiques contemporary architectural visions for the colonization of Mars. Finally, Josèfa Ntjam offers an exploration around Persona, a fictional character inhabited by memories and narratives from her ancestors’ fight for Cameroon’s independence, in a film that explores permeations between temporalities, histories, hybrid bodies, and geographies.

Between control experiments to determine signs of life and cosmic reworkings of history from personal and embodied stories of those silenced, Creamcake’s curators choose to defer to these human brains, rather than their machine-like counterpart for answers. Because when the H2G2 narrator asks, “Could a mere computer solve the problem of Life, the Universe, and Everything?” The answer should probably, hopefully be, “no.”

Programme 3hd 2022
"Deep Thought"

Shuang Li "I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side" (2018-2019)

Shuang Li focuses on a single commodity and its imagery—the yellow vests, produced in Yiwu, China, while reflecting on the object as it circulates around the world, then emerging as a symbol of a social movement in France. Following a fictional narrative of an online relationship between a French mother and a young Chinese factory worker at one of these high-visibility vest factories, the work aims to discuss digital relationships and desires, as well as the interdependence between the digital landscape and the physical infrastructure and logistics systems that support it – but, more importantly, the cracks in between.

Josèfa Ntjam "Dislocation" (2022)

In collaboration with Sean Hart and Nicolas Pirus, Josèfa Ntjam explores categories and labels through their deconstruction, in Persona’s journey telling of cycles, circulation and entanglement. In seeking permeations between temporalities, histories, hybrid (and sometimes monstrous) bodies and geographies made up with fragments of known and unknown, Ntjam’s character of Persona is subtly inhabited by memories and narratives from her ancestors’ fight for Cameroon’s independence. Reworking History from unofficial, personal and embodied stories, some of which have been silenced and sidelined, the artist mends historical legacy by integrating repressed voices and accounts, gathering fiction, memories, dreams, reality, myths, artificiality and orality, which is strongly linked to sound, vibrations and words under perpetual reconfiguration.

Agnieszka Polska "Perfect Lives" (2019)

In her film, the Agniszka Polska reflects on a 1990 control experiment, which took place when the Galileo spacecraft was passing Earth on its way to Jupiter. In the experiment, scientists wanted to determine if data sent from Galileo will confirm the existence of life on Earth. The film is constructed as a dense, hypnotic essay, where dynamically edited multiple layers of stock footage and music composed in similarity to game music create a melancholic atmosphere. The material used to create this poetic collage is a collection of hundreds of short stock videos presenting various scenes from human life and covering a number of themes, such as: business meetings, enjoying nature, group therapy, marriage, loneliness, crime. These highly artificial and unlikely situations seem to question the very existence of life: they are the evidence for the western idea of life being an illusion.

Alice Bucknell "The Martian Word for World is Mother" (2022)

Alice Buckwell merges speculative fiction, 3D worldbuilding, artificial intelligence, and critiquing contemporary architectural proposals for the habitation of Mars, in this exploration of three Martian worlds with very different understandings of the Red Planet‘s future, and who gets to decide. Working with historical and contemporary science-fiction, Donna Haraway‘s theories on the nonhuman, and emergent space economies as its narrative backbone, the project underscores the limiting aspects of our language of space exploration that does not pivot towards human settlement as the necessary default, while exploring the political, ecological, economic, technological, and linguistic parameters framing contemporary discussions of Mars.

3hd 2022: Life, the Universe, and Everything

The eighth edition of Creamcake’s annual 3hd Festival, will run at various locations across Berlin, from October 20 to 29 with the extended programme running to November 21. A spectrum of invited artists, performers, musicians, and DJs will probe our boundless sense of identity, belonging, and existence, within the equally limitless notion of “space”—in all its physical, conceptual, and linguistic forms – and share their perspectives on ideas of utopia and dystopia, nature and humanity, the universe and the metaverse, and beyond.

All works online: 3hd.tv

3hd 2022 is organized by Creamcake, and made possible with the support of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, NEUSTART KULTUR, Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Initiative Musik.

Creamcake

Creamcake (CC) is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary platform, negotiating the point of convergence in electronic music, contemporary art and digital technologies. Distanced from normative social structures, Creamcake moves in fluid processes of thought and action and engages with current social issues of the present through diverse projects. CC organizes performances, concerts, exhibitions, symposiums, DJ sets, digital projects, and workshops including 3hd-Festival (2015-Present).

IBB Video Space in the Berlinische Galerie

Since 2011 the IBB Video Space has been screening artists who work with time-based media. The programme, which changes every month, features not only established names in contemporary video art but also up-and-coming artists rarely seen in museums to date. For these, the Berlinische Galerie seeks to facilitate an institutional début. Each month brings a new encounter with work that raises questions about the medium and about social or political issues. Importance is attached to including marginalised perspectives and to shedding light on the impact of power structures.