Music & Apocalypse

Planet Earth is not a perfect sphere. It’s actually shaped more like a potato. Thus begins the first lecture by Phoebe Phaidon, a freshly minted doctor of climatology. She just started a part-time job at the Institute of Cybernetics and Modeling, where she creates simulations of how the environment will develop in the wake of climate change. So you could say she knows a thing or two about natural disasters. With the Institute facing closure unless it manages to pass an assessment, its academics are roped into a mission to save it. The question is how to change a bastion of murky speculation into a neoliberal machine for knowledge production. Max Linz (Asta Transfer, 14th New Horizons) is unrivaled in portraying the urban precariat. He is able to capture the material and existential condition of life as an eternal freelancer, as well as colorful, if not necessarily glorious, academic folklore. In this witty political satire, he asks what would happen if the university were turned into a corporation. The production of knowledge under such conditions would be an attempt to transform the potato into a perfect sphere. Music and Apocalypse takes a variety of forms, from musical, through Brechtian play, to a VR glitch. When it turns into a vision of purgatory from the works of Hans Memling, we know Judgment Day is near. Welcome to the hell of late capitalism.