Oscillation ::: from the Mothership focuses on the technologies, tools, and techniques that are an important part of the apparatus of music-making. The festival departs from the observation that cultures are shaped by the way technologies are used, rather than by the intention behind their design. But while technologies might be invented with a certain goal for use in mind and against a backdrop of specific socio-political situations, this junction can be severed and new constellations and findings can emerge. Historically, new technologies have in this way often opened up spaces for marginalised or excluded artists to realise their music without constraints such as manuals or a canon.

Although technology has always been an important determinant for the creation of music, the advent of electricity and electronic musical instruments brought about rapid change, giving rise to a wave of new formats, sounds, proceedings, or relations to the public. As new technologies have destabilised and pluralised traditional ideas of mastery, they have changed not only what music sounds like, but who it is produced by.

In this festival edition, we want to explore some aspects of this observation with the aim of unboxing technologies: understanding what is inside the box offers the opportunity to demystify these technologies and to use them freely and in alternative ways. This concerns the materiality of tools, including their ecological impact and the emergence of artificial intelligence; but we also want to honour the possibilities of vernacular craft, of hacking and open-source cultures, and the role that spaces play in creating inclusive cultures.

In our reflections, play is a powerful alternative to capitalist power which creates desires around tools to serve the market economy. DIY movements propose ways to hack this link with the aim of experimenting, opening, understanding, and repairing, foregrounding in this way also the ecological impact of the technologies we use in daily life. By doing this, in the last century new technologies have spurred many meaningful reflections about the social and political charges that technology can transport. Feminist, post-humanist, and post-colonial theory have articulated how technology can speak to the imagination.

The festival is part of tekhne, a project by Q-O2 and five other European partners. The research activities and events carried out during this project have helped to shape the festival program. The public will be able to participate in labs and workshops, and experience on-site projects as well as a number of concerts and installations aligning with this year’s topic. We want to celebrate technology, the doing ourselves and doing together.