REALITY ADDICTS demand more than the seclusion of multimedia: they are interested in the real human being, in words and images, in nature and culture. The dependence on reality devotes them to subvert that kind of reality which is produced through means of media-technology with the help of artistic strategies. They celebrate technical defects, play with the almost possible and commit themselves to nonsense seeking to multiply reality by means of exaggeration, rupture, distance, and ever new diversions.
unfinish! demanded the re-opening of artistic processes that are deemed closed and questioned finality in order to claim that any given situation is full of potential. The festival concentrated on the point at which, what seemed fixed can be undone, reversed, processed differently, and it questioned the importance of continuity and change. unfinish! is the battle cry and the curse of digital work that knows only consecutive versions instead of conclusions. A paradigm of digital culture?
Under the motto CONSPIRE...transmediale.08 aimed at examining dubious worlds of story-telling and remote opinion making in order to look critically at those means of creative conspiratorial strategies, that offer the potential to uncover new forms of expression in digital discourse. With conspirative speculations taking over society's cultural rules the distinction between truth and fiction was no longer possible and suddenly many things turned evil. The programme included artists who challenged, undermined and bypassed each other in their hidden and unspoken strategies of mystification.
Since 1973, video contributions have taken an essential part in the International Forum of New Cinema at the International Film Festival. 1988, the MedienOperative showed its own programme under the name VideoFilmFest – usually it has only been the second venue for screening of the selection.
In only its second year, VideoFest has become the largest european video festival. Video is a young artform; from the beginning, it has been a reaction to the “brave new world” of the highly technical mass societies with all their computers, nuclear power stations, destroyed landscapes and lonely individuals. Thus, video is not film; it remains bulky, playful and vulnerable. And it is left outside from „high“ culture.
Within a short time the VideoFest has become one of the most important international video festivals. The programme consisted of works covering the field of videoart and documentation; the intention was to point out video-specific realisations of documentaries.
1991 – the character of the programme has become more angular than before; there are more works that irritate in form and content, more documentaries that ry to find an innovative formal language for exciting topics, surprisingly more works that use artistic means to reflect upon social or political topics in an unusual way.
Also with the VideoFest ‘92, the MedienOperative claimed to reflect the development of international video culture and to represent a rich variety of genres – productions, sculptures, or selections from fields like interactive media and computer animation that break down boundaries.
VideoFest `93 had more to offer than ever before. On the one hand we offered a core programme of the usual high quality. On the other hand we can now boast greater space for all activities – the programme, installations, market, conferences, special showings, and so forth. Better informed and better entertained. Sometimes irritated, but never bored –plenty of mental turbulence.