transmediale.12: in/compatible

Festival for art and digital culture

From 31 January to 5 February 2012, the transmediale will present artworks, video screenings, workshops, performances and artistic interventions at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Titled “in/compatible”, the upcoming festival will focus on the artistic presentation of network culture in which everything is interconnected, but doesn’t necessarily fit or function together. Software developers and hackers both work to improve computer systems, the only difference being that hackers are not always motivated to keep them functioning, but to disrupt them in order to express criticism. In times of crisis, such resulting in/compatible tensions possess a regenerative potential. The transmediale will examine such approaches applied to technological systems, and transfer them to political, aesthetic and other social systems, as well as evaluate them in terms of the productive and destructive aspects of incompatibility.

The transmediale Award and the Open Web Award will no longer be offered in 2012. The Vilém Flusser Theory Award will continue as a residency programme for artistic research.

Programme
The two-day symposium “in/compatible: systems | publics | aesthetics” will be comprised of interdisciplinary panels on the production logic of incompatibility in contemporary network culture. The thematically related exhibition “Dark Drives: Uneasy Energies in Technological Times” will present 35 works of art and everyday culture which explore the relationship humans have with technology. The performance programme “The Ghosts in the Machine” will reflect on the in/compatible relationship between analogue and digital media. The video programme “Satellite Stories” will examine to what extent humans are compatible with the products they create.

25th anniversary
To mark its 25th anniversary, the festival will present an overview of the artistic and cultural history of media in Berlin. The newly created platform “reSource for transmedial culture” will encourage open exchange between media artists, researchers and hackers while envisioning the future of network culture.

Artistic director: Kristoffer Gansing
Artists: Ant Farm, Babak Afrassiabi & Nasrin Tabatabai, Chris Burden, Jennifer Chan, Shu Lea Cheang, Gabriella Coleman, Jodi Dean, Harun Farocki, Matthew Fuller, Dominic Gagnon, Goodiepal, Orit Halpern, Graham Harman, Stefan und Ralph Heidenreich, Tsila Hassine, Susanne Jaschko, Jodi, Sture Johannesson, Joshua Light Show, Eckart Lottman, Basim Magdy, Bjørn Melhus, Rosa Menkman, Sergio Messina, Ziv Neeman, Neozoon, Johannes P Osterhoff, Morten Riis, Roee Rosen, Billy Roisz, Andreas Schneider, Pit Schultz, Robert Sakrowski, jon.satrom, Igor Štromajer, Florian Wüst, Siegfried Zielinski