3hd Festival

Founded in 2015 and happening both online and at venues across Berlin, the hybrid festival specializes in music, performance, and visual art as a force for asking deeper questions around politics and identity, community and communication. The 3hd program has hosted musicians, performers, and artists working across disciplines to examine the critical limitations of contemporary institutions and media, alongside methods of action and resistance. The festival thrives on an always evolving avant-garde community shaped by digital culture and the internet. Each edition operates on its own theme and focus, responding to current socio-cultural issues and discursive ideas of relevance.

3hdTV

First launched during Creamcake’s sixth 3hd Festival, online screening and streaming space 3hdTV was developed as a result of the historical events and unpredictable conditions of 2020. The initiative was born through the “UNHUMANITY” edition and its decentralized “ECO-centers” companion program, where the collective was compelled to rethink its own infrastructure, goals and objectives in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its political and economic fallout. 3hdTV now enters a new phase for making room to explore and reconsider ideas of mobility and sustainability of the festival structure via the internet, as well as Creamcake as a whole. The platform has given us the chance to rewire the way we work with the artists and collaborators, formats and institutions within our global community.

Is it cold in the water?

A clear, tasteless, and almost colorless liquid that falls from the sky. The rain that forms from H2O is vital to the existence of all life on earth. It’s a chemical compound whose state responds to the conditions of its environment, becoming liquid, solid, even gas. Its mutability makes it as unpredictable as it is untameable. Creamcake’s four-part concert, performance, installation, and moving image series “Is it cold in the water?” dives into the depth and expanse of said solvent, examining both its representations and real-life effects crossing fluidity, permeability, and dissolution.

Rabbit Island

Ōkunoshima (大久野島) is a small piece of subcontinental land near Japan’s Hiroshima that’s overrun by feral bunnies. Located in the Inland Sea, the origins of its vast hoard of wild mammals is unclear—whether released by a school group following World War II, or escaped from their toxic fate at a poison gas testing facility during the island’s grim military heyday. Nonetheless, these creatures have made the tiny sanctuary their own, roaming freely together, undaunted by the ogling tourists for whom they’ve become entertainment. Creamcake’s Rabbit Island at Spreepark on July 29, 2023 honors this notion of adaptation to adversity, and the shifting social and cultural norms—both imposed and self-created—that dictate our own behaviors. 

10/11

Ten years—plus one (or two) now dissolved into the pandemic—is how long Creamcake has existed. Founded by Daniela Seitz and Anja Weigl in 2011, the ever-changing Berlin club night and events organizer has overcome the social and cultural devastation of the very recent past to finally celebrate a decade, give or take, of operation. Consider the “10/11” hybrid event series as Creamake’s extended anniversary party. Time is clearly relative and many of us are still making up for its loss.

Paradise Lost

There is no simple solution to today’s problems. In the overture and aftermath of the global COVID-19 crisis, it has become increasingly clear that contemporary social, political, economic and environmental developments, spanning a vast and complex network, connect us to myriad ends of the Anthropocene. Running at Berlin’s Kleiner Wasserspeicher and Großer Wasserspeicher from July 28 to August 12, 2021, Creamcake’s “Paradise Lost” program explicitly explores these notions of dystopia and apocalypse, transition and redemption, while also activating forms of care and recovery during pandemic and beyond. The installation and concert series brings together a spectrum of experimental, progressive and genre-crossing acts, presenting a wealth of different sounds, timbres, volumes and speeds in the monumental setting of Prenzlauer Berg’s two water reservoirs.

Paradise Found

A music and performance series which brought together a spectrum of experimental and progressive sonic and cross-genre live acts to the unique outdoor surroundings of Berlin’s Klosterruine. Taking place across three dates in 2019—each presenting three acts and three different headliners—“Paradise Found” aimed to nurture talent and allow it to develop at its own pace. The program supported artists who’d worked with Creamcake before, growing their practices more sustainably with sufficient resources and infrastructure. It acknowledged that it is only through empowerment, cooperation and connection in our community that curation can be a nourishing activity in an accelerated music and art scene.

Pop Psychology

A series of video commissions on Creamcake’s 3hdTV platform, “Pop Psychology” reflects on the serious social, political, and economic upheaval triggered by an ongoing pandemic. The videos trace the unresolvable tensions between political activism and noise, empowerment and performativity, consumer culture and self-care, making these points of friction visible as therapeutic drives of sustainability and empowerment.

“<Interrupted = “Cyfem and Queer>“

The experimental symposium is a day and night-long series of conversations, brainstorming sessions, panels, lectures and performances dedicated to broadening the discourse around digital space. A place for reflection and action at the intersection of media, technology, gender and sexuality, <Interrupted = “Cyfem and Queer”> aims to formulate strategies for queering the blurred line between science, music and art. The event positions itself at the point of tension between developments in the feminist canon, concerning gender as it relates to digital practices and transdisciplinary thinking. The symposium takes an experimental and interdisciplinary approach to examining the research of the past and connecting it to the future. http://interrupted.creamcake.de/

Europool

A platform and a public space for communication springing from the belief in grassroots political organisation and direct action, “Europool” invites artists incorporating political and queer messaging in their work at the intersection of music, performance, and activism. The daytime event presents cutting-edge thinking, listening and dancing aimed at encouraging exchange across disciplines and experiences, while exploring how openness, care, and solidarity can influence the broader socio-political landscape. It moves to expand and empower its artistic community by creating space for conversation around social justice, because a challenge to the dominant power structures can only come from its alternatives.

インフラ INFRA

A multimedia program of concerts, performances, exhibitions and talks, organized in collaboration with Japanese-run online gallery EBM(T) and happening in Tokyo in 2017, “インフラ INFRA” examined the infrastructures that rule the modern world. Exploring and promoting creative practices at the intersection of music, technology and contemporary art, it argues for providing structures of support. The cross-cultural festival offered access and awareness for a number of under-recognized artists from a range of contexts, offering insight into how participants use new technology to develop their own practices, while also engaging in a network of circulation enabled by the Internet. https://www.infra-festival.com/

NextGen

A play on its two imperatives of supporting the next generation and gender diversity, “NextGen” is a concert series promoting new digital genres created by artists. It is characterized by an energetic hybrid sound that deconstructs and repurposes material from many different sources, while drawing from an emergent youth culture of globally-aware musicians gathering in niche communities on the internet. These cross-disciplinary sonic practices transcend established traditions and scenes, developing where performance, contemporary art, and digital culture cross over. Facilitated by new technologies and the infinite reproducibility of digitality, the approach explores juxtapositions and fluidity across politics, identity, gender and online space.