The CTM 2020 MusicMaker’s Hacklab, hosted by Peter Kirn of CDM and 2020 co-host Tad Ermitaño, focused on how performance practice and invention can change the performer—making them someone or something else, making them newly visible, or making them entirely invisible. 
The Hacklab week began with Input talks kicked-off by a lecture by Tad Ermitaño. William Gibson famously said: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” The Philippines is one of those liminal places where even modernity is unevenly distributed. It is often described as semifeudal and semicolonial, and even the capital of Manila is a place where scientific literacy coexists with religious and animist beliefs.

At the same time, it is scarred in many places by the ruthless application of technology. As a result of its particular and partial relationship with modernity, it is a country where it is possible, even urgent, to consider the possibility of an animist technology, and what uses magic might still serve. 

The talk took place within CTM Festival’s daytime Discourse series that regroups a wide-ranging cast of artists, thinkers, practitioners, researchers, tinkerers, and industry professionals in a programme of talks, panel discussions, lecture-performances, workshops, film screenings and other formats of exchange.