A sense of disequilibrium is perhaps the defining symptom of our moment. From the dizzying heights of multiple peaks—oil demand, extraction, environmental debt, ableist infrastructure, inequality, corporate consolidation, commodification—the contradictions of industrial society have reached their tipping point. Against this queasy backdrop of global conditions, Creamcake’s 3hd 2025 tilts toward the theme of “Vertigo” with a festival that pulls focus on this perceptual, embodied, and phenomenological experience of disorientation. While some encounter these states as responses to our current crisis, others navigate them as part of their ongoing lived experience. This year’s program runs across venues in Berlin from October 1 to 5, and gathers artists, musicians, and performers whose practices explore strategies of self-preservation and resilience within the sensory overload of complex and oppressive reality.
Concerts, presentations, installations, film screenings, and a discourse event all interrogate the disruption of normative spatial assumptions that 3hd 2025: “Vertigo” represents. Audiences are invited on a journey of discovery, one that activates the somatic, sensory, and experiential possibilities of a condition that oscillates between the uneasy and the euphoric, the stable and the unstable. Art, music, poetry, and performance; care, withdrawal, intoxication, and nausea, all constitute modes of lived emotional and physical realities with the ability to disrupt the established order. In such bewildering times, it is creativity that grabs hold of this spinning moment, challenging dominant narratives of optimization and offering alternative ways of being that embrace uncertainty, vulnerability, and the transformative possibilities of such unsteady footing. By escaping a present shaped by these relentless demands, they reveal something about the nature of consciousness and our relationship to reality itself.
