transmediale 2020

transmediale 2020
"End to End"
28.01.2020 - 01.03.2020

transmediale 2020 Presents Month-long Group Exhibition The Eternal Network
As part of transmediale End to End we present the month-long group exhibition The Eternal Network, curated by Kristoffer Gansing with additional advice from Clemens Apprich, Daphne Dragona, Geert Lovink, and Florian Wüst. It will open on January 28, 2020, and remain on view at Haus der Kulturen der Welt until March 1.

About twenty-five international art and research-based works address the persistence of networks, with a focus on their potentials and limits in response to current social and technological changes and the need for new forms of decentralization.

In times of environmental crisis and political turmoil, networks have lost their mass appeal. Whatever we hear about them is usually in the context of a backlash: blackouts, propaganda, hate speech, addiction, and a desire to disintermediate by disconnecting from the platforms of surveillance capitalism. Still, networks have become ubiquitous and essential organizational tools for both activists and big politics, and whether digital or analogue, they seem to have become both poison and cure. Now that the limits of networks are more tangible, the exhibition readdresses “the network question” as being about future models of sociality, technology, and politics in societies after globalization.

Structured according to three lists of key concepts and technocultural shifts, The Eternal Network also features historical materials that relate to the legacies of critical net cultures as they formed in the early days of the public Internet in the 1990s. Their starting point is the eponymous pre-Internet concept proposed by Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, which predicted new possibilities of exchange in an emerging global world.

In the context of this pre-Internet imaginary of networks, the works and projects included in The Eternal Network exhibition close the loop between the pre- and post-Internet moments. With the backlash against networks in mind, it re-examines the legacies of critical net cultures, asking if and how they will continue to have an emancipatory relevance in the future.

With artworks and projects by Ursula Biemann, Blank & Jeron supported by Sakrowski, Tega Brain & Julian Oliver & Bengt Sjölén, Johanna Bruckner, Guo Cheng, Contemporary And (C&), convex tv., Louise Drulhe, David Garcia & Eric Kluitenberg, David Gauthier, Kyriaki Goni, Darsha Hewitt, Aay Liparoto, Olia Lialina, Alessandro Ludovico (Neural), Robert Luxemburg, Piratbyrån, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Bahar Noorizadeh, Ruini Shi, Timur Si-Qin, Solveig Suess, Jelena Viskovic, and Tobias Williams.

transmediale is a project by transmediale e.V. and Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The festival has been funded as a cultural institution of excellence by Kulturstiftung des Bundes since 2004.