// Festival theme
 
With the theme OVERLAP – Sound & Other Media, CTM.10 continues the discussion that began during our anniversary edition in January 2009 using the motif STRUCTURES – Backing-up Independent Audio-visual Cultures. In 2010, the situation, conditions, and future prospects of independent, self-determined creative work in music and experimental audio-visual cultures are examined from a new perspective. While the 2009 festival focused on analysis of the internal structures of independent music and media cultures, CTM.10 extends the radius and looks into the intersection – the overlap – between music and other creative, economic and social areas.
 
The role of music has been subject to massive change in recent years. On the one hand, music is becoming ever more ubiquitous with the spread of audiovisual media, and sound has become an increasingly important element of design. On the other hand, musicians' concept of themselves as actors in an independent artistic field is being eroded. Musicians are increasingly faced with challenges as their creativity is progressively bound up with different art/design forms and they are, effectively, left to pursue ambitions alien to music: for example, as designers of acoustic brand signatures, as content suppliers for internet and mobile phone operators, as sound designers for computer games, as specialists in product and information design, in architecture, as sound dramaturges in fashion's catwalk presentations and, of course, in the disciplines of filmmaking, fine arts, dance and theatre, all the way through to performance art.
 
The causes of this development are manifold: the desire for the interlinking of the individual senses and their corresponding aesthetic forms is an ancient motive of human creativity. It is based on a certain predisposition of the human perception apparatus, as well as the need for transgressive experiences, which go beyond everyday experience. With the rapid development of audiovisual media, it is now increasingly possible to realize these ideas. Intermediality is inherent in the electronic and digital technologies in which everything becomes electronically coded information and is processed according to the same fundamental principles, independent of objectives or output media. The growing convergence of media and, consequently, also of the artistic disciplines, is elemental in the logic of these technologies. Another engine of development is the market. Due to the profound crisis in the music industry, many musicians currently find themselves looking for new fields of activity. This is just one symptom of the fundamental transformation of the economy from production of material goods towards the exploitation of intangible assets, the essential resources of which are attention, time, creativity, information and intellectual property. The intersection of media formats and economic fields is, therefore, also inherent in the logic of the so-called attention economy.
 
This has meant changes in the role and scope of activities for musicians, sound designers, acousticians, label operators, publishers and distributors. But also, producers in other artistic and technical disciplines have had to increase their competence in sound and music. This situation gives rise to new perceptions and modified uses of music for listeners and consumers; a new awareness of everyday sound, for example.
 
Overall, listening, and the different forms of sound and music, now have greater importance than ever before. At the same time, the dissolution of approved structures and value-adding chains in the music economy is often felt as a loss of music's perceived cultural importance by those involved. But what is the relation here between cause and effect? Have musicians responded inappropriately to the technological and social changes and sidelined themselves? Or is any attempt to tackle these challenges simply tilting at windmills, since individual disciplines, in the wake of growing media convergence, have, inevitably, lost relevance? Should musicians, in the long term, just get used to the idea that music's pop-cultural pole-position as the societal 'difference engine' dissolved long ago in the face of the internet, social networks, fashion, game-culture, graphic design and art, and that music has become, like other fields, just one among many?
 
CTM.10 takes a critical look at the opportunities and risks of developments where media and creative disciplines increasingly melt together, and where previously fixed roles are now in flux. The discussion continues on how best to approach the transformation in music culture.
 
OVERLAP – Sound & Other Media, is not only CTM.10’s festival theme, but also the second instalment of the two-year project STRUCTURES – Backing-up Independent Audio-visual Cultures.