Jan 31–Feb 3, 2019
transmediale 2019
What role do emotions and empathy play in digital culture? How do feelings become objects of technological design? How can we resist the polarizing consequences of affective politics? In the 32nd edition of the festival, artists, cultural workers, and theoreticians investigate and challenge technologies of feeling that are shaped by digital cultures. One of the key questions is: What moves you? It refers not only to an emotional response but also to the way in which affect becomes mobilized as a political force today.
For the first time in many years, in 2019 the transmediale will have no title. As a reaction to the crisis-ridden present, the festival will focus on live practices and create a learning environment rather than ascribing meanings. In keynotes, performances, short film screenings, and workshops, transmediale 2019 puts its focus on live, contradictory, and not yet fully formed digital cultures of artistic vision, speculative thinking, activist intervention, and counter-cultural dreaming.
In an installation environment designed by the artist and designer Ebba Fransén Waldhör, transmediale presents performances such as Rory Pilgrim’s Software Garden, a work between Kabuki theater, pop concert, and political space of action. Filipa César’s and Louis Henderson’s film Sunstone traces the techno-cultural legacy of the Fresnel lens and its associations of seeing and understanding. Mykola Ridnyi’s film No! No! No! features protagonists from Ukrainian Kharkiv who experience their early 20s as they coincide with the outbreak of war in the neighboring region of Donbass. In their keynote speeches, Shaka McGlotten, Jackie Wang, Ben Anderson, and Rebecca Coleman will discuss the networked experience of love, practices of time marronage, and forms of boredom emerging in precarious times.
With further contributions by Actress + Young Paint (Live AI/AV), Claudio Agosti, Syrian Archive, Asia Bazdyrieva und Solveig Suess (Geocinema), Jeremy Gilbert, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Jara Rocha, Caroline Sinders, and many more
The complete program: transmediale.de
Curated by Daphne Dragona, Kristoffer Gansing, Inga Seidler, and Florian Wüst
transmediale is a project by Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The festival has been funded as a cultural institution of excellence by Kulturstiftung des Bundes since 2004.