transmediale/festival 2018 "face value"

transmediale/festival 2018 "face value"
31.01.2018—04.02.2018
HKW, Berlin

transmediale/festival 2018 "face value"
31.01.2018—04.02.2018
HKW, Berlin

artistic director
Kristoffer Gansing

An Ongoing Adventure in Art, Culture, and Technology

transmediale is a Berlin-based festival and year-round project that draws out new connections between art, culture, and technology. It considers technology as being more than the digital world and the cultural as being more than what emerges from within institutionalized fields of production. Accordingly, the activities of transmediale aim at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies. In the course of its 30 year history, the annual transmediale/festival has turned into an essential event in the calendar of media art professionals, artists, activists and students from all over the world. The broad cultural appeal of the festival is recognized by the German Federal Government who supports the transmediale through its program for beacons of contemporary culture.

A Leading Media Arts Event: About the Festival

In the scope of its acclaimed annual festival, transmediale presents an extensive range of exhibitions, conferences, screenings, performances, and publications to 25,000 visitors. Each year, a specific theme provides the framework for hundreds of artists, media activists, researchers, designers, and other creative tinkerers to engage in reflective, aesthetic, and speculative positions in between art, culture, and technology. The formats of the festival change from year to year as transmediale tries to foreground the intrinsic link between transdisciplinary thinking and cultural practice. However, certain program areas have been established over the years, guided by some general principles.

The exhibition program presents thematically curated works in combination with a selection of entries from transmediale’s open submission platform. It is particularly oriented to artworks that challenge us to rethink our everyday relationship to technology, old and new.

The conference and workshop programs depart from the festival theme and use it to explore the critical dimension of networking, hacktivism, media theory and the politics of technological development. Throughout the years, renowned speakers from the academic and artistic fields have taken part either as keynote speakers or conference panelists. The workshop program connects and expands on the projects presented in the other program sections and offers both practical and discussion-based approaches in more specialized and intimate settings.

The film and video program is devoted to contemporary artistic video works and experimental film screenings with historical references. It encompasses a wide, contemporary spectrum of short artistic video works and special programs of artist retrospectives, thematically related feature films or documentaries.

Live audiovisual expressions of old and new media form the main focus of the performance program. It presents cross-disciplinary projects in the fields of installation, sound, performance and video on stage, showcasing the search for new forms of expression between artistic genres. Moreover, CTM Festival (formerly club transmediale) takes place in cooperation with transmediale, presenting a parallel program dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital & experimental music.