transmediale 2016 – Conversation Piece

The transmediale is one of the largest festivals of art and digital culture in Germany and has been staged in Berlin every year for the past 30 years. It is one of Germany’s cultural institutions of excellence which the Federal Cultural Foundation has pledged to support in the long term.

At this year’s festival, titled “Conversation Piece”, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin became a forum of intensive dialogue. Inspired by the painting genre of the same name, the transmediale presented subjects that sparked conversation and encouraged the exchange of ideas.

The festival wanted to scrutinise dialogically very different aspects of life in digital capitalism, and on the basis of four thematic streams (“Anxious to Act”, “Anxious to Make”, “Anxious to Share” and “Anxious to Secure”), investigate activities and behaviours which are necessary for cultural production and participation today.

Programme highlights

In cooperation with the online magazine Berliner Gazette, transmediale/conversationpiece presented a series of workshops and round tables. Subject of discussion were the Snowden Archives, a collection of all documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013, as a kind of collective subconscious that will be consulted with regard to the social and political present and future.

As examples of the hybrid presentation formats that will take place throughout transmediale 2016, during the opening night the documentary video and mapping project Parallelograms by Steve Rowell has been set up as an installation in the HKW auditorium. The film "Echtzeit" by Hellmuth Costard and Jürgen Ebert from 1983, which addressed the interaction of computer graphics, military technology, and simulation at a strikingly early time, has been rediscovered and screened.

The transmediale is a project by the Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The Federal Cultural Foundation supports the transmediale as one of Germany’s cultural institutions of excellence.

Artistic director: Kristoffer Gansing
Curators: Oliver Lerone Schultz (Anxious to Act), Teresa Dillon (Anxious to Make), Ben Vickers (Anxious to Share), Theresa Züger (Anxious to Secure) and Florian Wüst (film and video programme), Daphne Dragona (co-curricular programme).
Artists and participants: James Bridle, Keller Easterling, Femke Herregraven, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Nicolas Maigret, Alona Rodeh, Harel Schreiber aka Mule Driver, Troy Conrad Therrien, Vermeir & Heiremans, Eyal Weizman.