The 14th edition of the CTM Festival will take place from 28 January - 3 February 2013. Under the title, The Golden Age, the Festival this time seeks to reflect on the (over-)abundance of music in the modern world and its consequences for individuals, aesthetics, politics and the economy.

The HAU theatre, Berghain and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien will once again host most events, yet further venues will likely round out the festival map according to the specific needs of individual projects.

We invite artists and researchers as well as agents, initiatives and organizations to send us project proposals till July 31 relating to the first draft of our festival theme The Golden Age (detailed below).

THEME: THE GOLDEN AGE

Under the conditions deployed by digital culture, globalization and postmodernism, that which has always been key aspirations and promise of art and pop culture now fully unfolds: unleashed subjectivity and an unharnessed imaginary meet the wide public acceptance of its diverse forms of expression. Those manifest not so much as essential originality but rather as the products of continuous processes of self-design based on the ad lib appropriation and transformation of an eclectic range of resources.

Against this backdrop, today’s music presents itself as more diverse than ever before, and never before have the listeners’ ears been so receptive. This “anything goes” situation, barely constrained by canons, technological limitations or gatekeeper authorities, fosters what appears to be a paradisical flowering of fully realized creative potential: The Golden Age. Its hallmark is a kind of ubiquitous eclecticism, that equally characterizes contemporary art music, pop-cultural niches and remnants of the mainstream, and brushes aside tired differentiation between high and low.

Today, we all can draw from an increasing abundance of material just waiting to be sourced. Given that art and music are accumulative because past forms cede to new developments yet continue to exist, all that ever happened is up for grabs in the present. If nothing is ever discarded then everything is a potential resource; even what was once considered waste now is recycled as cultural artifacts. Re-contextualisation, pastiche, montage, anachronism, recombination, paradox, fusion and morphing are just some of the tools and methods applied.

Such eclecticism serves personal growth and survival strategies in equal measure. Eclectic approaches rely on the originality of the materials and methods employed. Marginality thereby becomes the dominant principle. That which initially appears to be the manifestation of long-fought-for creative freedom therefore quickly also reveals its shadow side: competition for the limelight, narcissism, “tumblerization”, redundancy, unfair appropriation, sterility, or superficial “Facebook-referentiality” are just some of the catchwords up for discussion. Consequently, not all artists optimistically welcome the explosion of aesthetic diversity on the digital matrix, or the opportunities for recombination it affords them. By radically restricting themselves to a limited range of source material and strictly defined methods, or by stubbornly working through meticulous variations on long since established styles, such artists swim against the current, even when their work thereby turns out no less eclectic than anyone else’s. Likewise notable is a growing attentiveness to analog processes in real materials, in which entropy and decay are positioned against the supra-temporality of the digital.

Eclecticism has been a base credo for the CTM Festival since the get-go, and this year will be no different. Under the consciously polemic and glistening, ambivalent theme The Golden Age, we’ll investigate artistic approaches to the contemporary cornucopia and the yawning chasms it hides, and simultaneously reflect critically on our own curatorial practice. How best to distinguish between fruitful and sterile eclecticism? Which perspectives are required to establish criteria that foster a broader discourse? And how to move towards new forms of sharing and communication from this molecular aesthetic? The terms tension, intensity and friction give a hint of eventual answers that will be explored further in the concert, exhibition and discourse programs.

HOW TO SEND IN

This is not an official call. Proposals may be submitted in informal formats by › email. We are just as interested in work or papers by individual artists and thinkers as in curatorial or collective projects, programs, workshops, etc. Proposals might be submitted for the music, performance, discourse, workshop or exhibition strands of our program, examples of which from previous years are detailed online.

Please understand that we are unable to respond to every proposal submitted. As much as we would like to correspond with everyone who expresses an interest in our festival, we are still a very small team with a persistently heavy work-load. We will therefore reply only to those proposals we seriously consider appropriate for the CTM.13 program.

TRANSMEDIALE

As always, the festival will be held in parallel to and in collaboration with the transmediale – festival for art and digital culture. transmediale 2013 will explore the theme BWPWAP! and has just published its annual call for works. You can find details of its theme and conditions of entry › here.