HACKER AUF ESTRADIOL
Maria Babusch
Based on an examination of Nam June Paik’s poetic media theory, HACKER AUF ESTRADIOL is a lecture performance that explores a marginal area of media and technology history.
From the invention of the industrial to the Wachowski sisters’ Matrix films and a whistleblower in the Iraq war, there is a mysterious connection between trans women and new media and technologies. It leads back to the 1960s, when Nam June Paik produced some of his central works and the identity “transsexual” became established as a medical diagnosis. At the same time, two almost forgotten pioneers began their work: the computer scientist Lynn Conway and the musician Wendy Carlos. It is a different Sixties that we encounter here, and yet they shine a clear light on our present and how people connect or are connected with media today.
HACKER AUF ESTRADIOL questions the protagonists of this history in the mode of an essayistic fabulation about the moon, San Francisco, the beginning of electronic music, the loss of techno optimism and the aftermath.
Because every time a new medium falls into our laps, it harbours the potential of another world. And if we had no media, there would be no place for longing.
Cast & Credits:
Maria Babusch
A co-production of the Rekorder and the Museum Ostwall in the Dortmunder U.
About the artists
Maria Babusch is an author, theatre maker and presenter. She was invited to the auftakt festival in 2021 and developed a production for Schauspiel Dortmund as part of the collective Operation Memory. Her lecture performance HACKER AUF ESTRADIOL premiered in 2023, the same year she began studying Literary Writing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
