We live in terrifying times. Dispatches of wars, disasters, and crises circulate with unceasing regularity and ease, while an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness underscores an ever more incomprehensible world at odds with its own logic. The impossible has become possible. Reality is stranger than fiction. The tenth edition of Creamcake’s 3hd, with its title “The Shadows That Linger,” probes this uncanny realm where the ordinary becomes obscure in an “always-already” defined by digital technology, nostalgia, and deterritorialization. Wading deep into this hauntological space between the familiar and the unfamiliar from October 19 to November 3, the festival will examine the spiritual and the ghostly, the ambiguous and the uncertain, alongside those historical, political, cultural, and social relics and reverberations that continue to affect us all.

The interdisciplinary program aims to open up to the political potential of discomfort. In experiencing and engaging with the alien and the otherworldly, “The Shadows That Linger" will spend the present working through the specters of the past in an attempt to transform dread into a drive for a better future. A decade since its first edition, the concerns raised in 3hd 2015’s “The Labor of Sound in a World of Debt” seem almost trite compared to the sheer scale and impact of today’s cultural flux, social disparity, and environmental degradation, and the mass violence, destruction, and suffering that continues to unfold globally. Perhaps it’s worth reflecting on this seemingly simpler past as part of a circuitous chain of events leading to the present, while remembering that chains can be broken and shadows do fade.