Anguish Models & Empathy Machines: Mensch Maschine Musik at E-WERK

John Quin attends a festival of interdisciplinary performances at Luckenwalde, featuring Bendik Giske, Rae Hsu, Nazanin Noori, Discovery Zone and more

©Kathleen Pracht

Luckenwalde lies about 30 miles south of Berlin, easily accessible for the city’s residual clubbing community. But, given the placards tied to lampposts advertising candidates in an upcoming mayoral contest, the town feels a million miles away from the capital in terms of political tilt. Here the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, slogan Deutschland Aber Normal – ‘Germany but normal’, whatever that means) have a 35.2% share of the vote as of this year, more than double their rivals. The beefy baldy guy on one of the posters looks like he’d enjoy kicking your teeth in; another is a dead ringer for Hermann Göring. As for the place itself, think 1943: cobbled streets, badly rendered concrete buildings, the remains of an old Stalag POW camp. Here we enter the psychogeography of The Great Escape where the descendants of the Gestapo might wish you ‘Good Luck’ (in English, natch) as you sneakily try to board a bus. You see yourself running the streets like a rat in a trap before getting caught and sent back behind the wire. Cooler!

Nowadays Berlin’s hipsters hide away from the ever-growing neo-fascist madness at E-WERK, an old coal power station built in 1913, now repurposed as a regenerative source of electricity production and a not-for profit art space. Next door is its partner, an old Stadtbad, a disused Bauhaus-inspired swimming pool with a strikingly modernist interior whose architecture recalls that of Erich Mendelsohn, of Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion and Luckenwalde’s own (once renowned) hat factory, a couple of hundred yards down the road. The Stadtbad is now drained, and a crowd sits awkwardly on the cold and old chipped tiles as they dip down to the deep end where tonight’s acts perform. The space is strikingly lit in electric blues and magentas. All’s cool in the pool.

Given E-WERK’s commitment to sustainability and environmental protection there’s plenty of worried references to planetary instability in the blurbs for this evening’s events. We are told the acts aim to “redirect technologies of violence towards artistic expression”. I understood the key exemplar of these brutal technologies to be AI – and the general level of unease over what its use might infer as regards our Earth’s survival.

The post Anguish Models & Empathy Machines: Mensch Maschine Musik at E-WERK appeared first on The Quietus.