In That Weird Age

IN THAT WEIRD AGE – CTM. 13 – The Golden Age. Festival for Adventurous Music and Arts at Kunstraum Kreuzberg Berlin

In That Weird Age highlights a music culture in transition, showcasing the odd splendour of plenitude that currently arises from now defunct physical storage media and the end of fixed recordings, as well as from the new musical vernacular of internet user cultures, the exponential potency and open-ended processability of digital sound files, the amassment of immaterial artefacts in online archives, and the promiscuous connectivity of a general state of plenty, where everything exchanges with everything.

Playfully addressing these phenomena from different angles, the exhibition also shows that although they appeared under many different names over the last years, such phenomena all lead to a perceived synchronicity, or an ubiquitous appearance of art and sound in everyday lives. This in turn has created that uncanny and weird experience of time that many now experience.

In physics the notion of time is a flexible one, probably best described with the theory of the relativity of simultaneity. The idea is that simultaneity – when two events occur at the same time – is not absolute, but depends on the observer’s frame of reference. Brought into its modern version by Einstein in his Theory of Relativity, the idea is often expressed via the famous train-and-platform experiment suggested by Einstein in 1917. The experiment stars two observers, one on board a train (and so within the intertial frame of reference of the train), and the other on a platform, in a stationary frame where “forward and backward” or “past an present” act as reference points. A flash of light is given off at the center of a train car just as the two observers pass each other. Because s/he is in the inertial frame of the moving train, the onboard observer sees the front and back of the train car at fixed distances from the source of the light, and, as such, observes that the light reaches the front and back of the car at the same time. The observer standing on the platform, however, sees the rear of the train car moving (catching up) toward the point at which the flash was given off in the first place, and the front of the train car moving away from it. The light headed for the back of the train thus has less distance to cover than the light headed for the front, and as such will reach the end of the train faster, according to this observer.

Kunstraum Kreuzberg Berlin

Opening: 25.01.2013, 19h
Exhibition Runs: 26.1–24.2.2013
Opening times during CTM 28.1.–3.2.13 Mon–Sun 12–22:00, all other days: 12–19:00