transmediale.05

transmediale is the biggest festival for art and the creative application of digital media in Germany. Once a year, the festival presents new and important projects within digital culture as well as reflections on the role of digital technologies in contemporary society.

transmediale.05 investigates the BASICS of artistic work with digital technologies. It examines the aesthetic and ethical foundations of a souped-up, hyper-potential culture and presents models of artistic practice whose ethics are based not on past value systems but on appropriating our extreme and contradictory present.

Our world of experience is shaped to a considerable degree by technologies: the internet and mobile telephones are transforming social relationships, robotics is revolutionising industrial production, whilst biotechnology is establishing a new relationship between our bodies and nature. And although technical apparatuses potentially augment our powers of influence and offer us greater security, we are experiencing growing disorientation. The ethical questions of what we ought to do and what we should be responsible for are swamped by a myriad of choices.

Technologies open up new fields of activity and create the interfaces at which personal and common realities can be creatively shaped. At the same time, they generate mechanisms of exclusion. If, however, we wish to fully exploit the potential for creatively shaping these realities, we must recognise both the ethical and aesthetic effects as well as the limits of the technologies we are using.

transmediale.de

A project run by the Kulturveranstaltungs-GmbH in co-operation with the House of World Cultures