Crushed Now // Temporal Compression

Crushed Now—After Turing // Beyond Presence is a concert series of five concert evenings that positions itself as a musical platform for hybrid relational spaces at the intersection of instruments, technology, and spatial design. Within these hybrid spaces and relational networks, the series artistically engages with the current debate surrounding the concept of instrumentality. Artists from various fields—ranging from early and contemporary music to coding, DJ-ing, and AI-video—perform in different constellations, exploring and expanding the concept of instrumentality. Traditional instruments and advanced audio technologies are not presented as predefined tools, but rather as sound generators in dynamic, hybrid sonic fields. In these fields, zones of intensity and condensation emerge where bodies, instruments, and technologies merge, collaboratively shaping both social and aesthetic spaces.
 From the perspective of this hybrid spatiology in music, the project understands instrumentality as space: a relational, perception-oriented, and behaviorally driven practice in which musical action becomes an experiment that transcends the dichotomies of human vs. machine and reality vs. virtuality creating a relational field in which gestures and musical decisions are distributed across human and non-human actors, constantly renegotiating how sound is heard, shared, and interpreted.
In this co-presence of human and machine not only is the instrument itself reshaped, but also the sociocultural architectures of performance. Bodies, artificial artifacts, and sounds encounter, interact, and collide gesturally in dense, often complex constellations. These interactions—between traditional instruments, expanded performative practices, varied loudspeaker configurations, and 3D audio sound compositions—create a compositional spatial practice in which presence is continuously reshaped as a dynamically produced (im)balance between human and machine actors—through body, sound, and interpretation. Instrumentality transforms into an aesthetic, perceptual, and social practice that reconfigures our concert culture, generating collective and relational modes of listening.