#MTFBerlin – Welcome to the Event Horizon
Black holes are curious things, and I won’t claim to be an expert on the topic, but their existence and subsequent theories interest me as I often find direct comparisons in my own life. I am particularly interested in theories of what would happen if you were to fall through a black hole. All my TV sci-fi knowledge indicated I would simply be crushed, torn apart, disintegrated or just simply made to stop existing in space and time in any capacity. But some theories point to a different idea; one where you cease to exist in one reality but safely pass through to another.
Many of us that go to a Music Tech Fest event dangle on the cusp. This gathering is our Event Horizon. A point of no return. Reach it and there is no escape. And over a week, we move past it and bound towards a black hole of music, technology, innovation, blood, sweat and tears.
We journey as a tribe (as Dubber often describes us) to a place where we attempt to leave behind one reality and pass through into a space of creativity, collaboration and camaraderie. We attempt to eliminate our bad bits, our darkness, our past, our self loathing perceptions of ourselves, our repetition – if only for few days. We don our t-shirts and we push hard, we think better, we twist ankles and knees, we walk 60km around a stage in a weekend, we high five, we cry, we sit in empty hotel lobbies and out on doorsteps until 6am fixing the world, we get sick, we get better, we lose shit, we find new things, and maybe we eat and sleep.
The more I read about black holes, the more I draw comparisons. Space and time become meaningless once you are sucked in. I look back on MTFBerlin and don’t really recognise that I was even in Berlin. I saw so little of it, I was not really there. As for time, it just disappears and you want to hold on to every bit of it no matter the damage. Just ask the chap at passport control who looked at my passport/face several times before my weary eyes somehow told him I had only slept 6 hours total over 3 nights, waving me through with a Germanic grunt. Yet this didn’t bother me. The limited time I get with my tribe means sleep is just a waste of time.
Hawking theorised that an Event Horizon radiates streams of particles back into our universe. As do we. What we do is not to conquer, or to profit, or even to succeed. Ours is to radiate back, failures and all, and to push the things we love in the right direction. And we will keep radiating, until like Hawking predicts, we eventually lose our mass and disappear.