Natalia Stuyk, Garden Gaia

Nov 10–13, 2022

Cosmic Awakening

Concerts, installations, films, lectures, discussions

Nov 10–13, 2022

Time and space travel, cyborgs and escapism – how do visions of the future transform into music? A festival of utopian sounds.

Science fiction “suspends our disbelief in the unreal in order to look askance at our belief in the real.[...] Its game is called cognition; the prize is the cosmos.” This is how Dietmar Dath put it in Niegeschichte, his monumental examination of the history and theory of the genre. Sci-fi has many manifestations: literature, films, comics, visual arts and even music. From the sound experiments of Joe Meek or Bebe and Louis Barron to the “cosmic music” of German electronic artists, the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra or George Clinton and funk artists like Earth, Wind & Fire and Janelle Monáe, sci-fi-influenced music has grown to become a fertile and diverse genre over the past sixty years. Cosmic Awakening aims to make science fiction resound, but also to deal with its theories and criticism. There will be concerts, installations, films, lectures, discussions and a few surprises.

Part of The New Alphabet