Much of 20th century society strove to depict 2010 as a shining example of a future framed by technological progress and social harmony. But as 2010 arrived it was clear that global society was neither the utopia nor the dystopia traditionally presented. FUTURITY NOW! invited for the creation of new templates for the future and asked not what the future has in store for us, but what it is that we have in store for the future.
In our post-future era of acceleration and densification of information, the state and nature of being live and online becomes one of the crucial definers of our social presence. Response and action are compressed into an existential here and now triggering a durée of continuous digital stimulation. With RESPONSE:ABILITY transmediale.11 explored the emerging qualities of liveness as a fundamental nature of our present digital culture and discusses the abilities, that are required to respond to social, political and economic processes triggered by the intensity of our participation and interaction.
Incompatibility is the condition arising when things are not working together. Given the current worldwide proclamations of crisis, be they political, financial, technological or environmental, it may seem as if incompatible elements and situations are everywhere, that everything is failing. Ironically, it is the supposedly ever-more compatible media-scape, where everything connects, that render such crises instantly visible.
Looking beyond the alarmist scenarios of environmental, social and economic catastrophes to be expected in the wake of global warming, the essential question isn't that of how to avoid these processes, but to examine the need for a fundamental shift in cultural perception with respect to nature, culture and technology. With DEEP NORTH,transmediale.09 focused on the impact and unavoidable consequences of this pending global transformation - the crossing of a point of no return akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
The transmediale 00 festival occurred at the turn of the millenium: the whole world was speculating about major computer break downs, philosophies that go astray discovering never-imagined paths of cognitive territory, and the world took one step closer to its own doom. The world of media changed in so far as everything that used to exist on a material basis, such as newspapers, books and even the further technologized TV, was distributed digitally.
transmediale.01 wanted to turn passive media consumers into active producers: visitors should get the opportunity to experience artistic and media-technological strategies in order to give them the opportunity to create art by themselves, in situ. Thus, DIY [do it yourself!] reflected the emancipatory and self-empowering tendency of the digital era in media-artistic practices.
go public! is a term used in the context of the new economy, meaning the Initial Public Offering (IPO) on a stock market. Originally, however, this meant the publication of information, the step into the public arena. In the digital era, progressive media practice and the commercialisation of public space are becoming more pervasive. The mass media are multiplying their channels and are homogenising their contents.
Conceptualised as a counter-weight to economic and military forms of globalisation, transmediale.03 presented itself as an artistic "global player": aesthetic and critical strategies were called upon to create playful ideas to handle globalisation in ironic and humorous manners. Questions about the suppression of artistic "dialects" in favour of a global language of the arts and about the general change of artistic practices and strategies caused by globalisation were discussed at the conference session.
FLY UTOPIA! dealt with the hope that lies beneath the infinite potential of possibilities in the era of media technology, but was also concerned with the hopelessness of a completely technologised and dis-cultured society, which is dominated by the unlimited claim and use of power. Reality and artistic visions cannot be distinguished in utopian and dystopian pictures anymore: FLY UTOPIA! demanded to overcome pessimism and rediscover today's utopian potential.
transmediale.05 explored the BASICS, the aesthetic and ethical foundations of artistic practice with digital technologies in a hyper-potential culture. It presented models of an artistic practice whose ethics derive not from past value systems, but from an appropriation of an extreme and contradictory, contemporary culture.