Jan 29–Feb 24, 2008

transmediale.08: CONSPIRE...

Festival for art and digital culture Berlin

A programme by Kulturprojekte Berlin in co-operation with the House of World Cultures

Festival: Jan 29 - Feb 3, 2008

Exhibition: Jan 30 - Feb 24, 2008

The diverse, rapidly emerging mobile communication structures, the Internet and the global media, are spawning questionable hierarchies, new structures of belief and mechanisms of derealisation. transmedial.08 examines these developments under the motto CONSPIRE… The programme includes an exhibition on the theme CONSPIRE…, an extensive film and video programme, an interdisciplinary conference with international experts, a conspiratorial Bilderberg Salon, experimental performances, and the presentation of the transmediale Awards for 2008. The programme will be supplemented by a variety of external and partner events.

With great imagination and intellectual curiosity, the exhibition CONSPIRE... examines the original meaning of 'conspiring'. The exhibition presents over thirty works by international artists (Uršula Berlot, Ilana Halperin, Hassan Khan, Trevor Paglen and Artur Zmijewski, among others), most of which were done on commission for transmediale.08. The exhibition opens on 24 February. It is curated by Nataša Petrešin Bachelez, a Slovenian art critic and curator living in Paris.

The conference, together with the exhibition, forms the heart of the festival. It serves as a roadmap, providing a guide through the highly ramified and not always visible or identifiable fields of conspiracy and conspiracy theories created by today’s digital information culture. The participants in five different panels will be taking a close look at the theme CONSPIRE… without ever losing sight of the fascination that the hidden, the secretive and the occult exert on us. Conference themes will include the fear manipulated by terror networks and political institutions, the interactive ‘circulo relexivo’, and the CERN experiment’s endeavour to create a tiny black hole. The keynotes will be presented by outstanding scientists such as Humberto Maturana and Otto E. Rössler. The festival conferences will be available online worldwide as live streams und live chats in real time.