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.
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.