Feb 6 / Wrapping Up transmediale.11

Wrapping Up transmediale.11

Feb 6 / Review of Day 6!

This afternoon’s screening of the immediated autodocumentary, The Future of Art, by the Emergence Collective (as a sidebar to the multidisciplinary creative studio KS12) generated a large and enthusiastic crowd for the revealing of the participatory video project that was shot and edited during the week of transmediale.11. The work incorporates several social media platforms – such as Flickr, Soundcloud, Quora, twitter and vimeo – to create and distribute collaborative storytelling. Throughout the 23-minute ‘Autodoc’, participants of transmediale, as well as other artists and theorists, jam on notions such as the progression of art in digital culture, the definitive avant-garde towards how the concept of the genius is moving away from the individual artist and becoming the actual use of an idea, often in a shared space. Gabriel Shalom of KS12 described the project as not having a definite statement – it’s rather a crystallization of a bigger idea in motion. He was also appreciative of the fact that the majority of footage included in The Future of Art was hand-delivered to KS12. Even in the midst of a digital culture conference, where concepts of simulation and accelerated media communication, Shalom stated the importance of present and physical interconnectivity with fellow collaborators.

Meanwhile, Kulturlabor Trail & Error continued to exchange materials and ideas, as they have been all week, along with their collaborators Open Design City. Judith Muijer of the collective was busy in the Open Zone, gathering passer-by to assist her in constructing a video projection screen out of used teabags. Muijer says their intentions with Trail & Error are “about awareness, not only environmental awareness, but also social awareness and social opportunities.” For example, using a teabag (someone else’s waste) to make a projection screen is one example of the potentiality of an object as it is passed from one user and re-appropriated into another network of useful possibility. Muijer says their project is a perfect fit for transmediale because “it’s all about the open zone, and about what is free, what is open, what is communication, and what kind of networks can be build in different ways.” Their projects throughout the week focus on tangible materials that can be incorporated into the digital terrain, and they take their name from their exploratory approach to new project ideas, with or without a successful outcome.

In the final hours of the festival, transmediale Director Stephen Kovats is amazed that “the HKW has been completely full of life, non-stop throughout the whole festival. It’s huge cross-section of people from all over the place, so it’s doing all the things it’s supposed to be doing, which is great.” As for trying to keep the festival fresh for each annual installment, Kovats says, “we purposely look at different formats and different structures of expressing the ideas that we have. The way we try to expand on the ideas and create discussion and debate is also partly a product of the kinds of forms and attractions that we want at the festival. We don’t want to have a simple formula, so this year has a particular look."

Though art, society and technology can be labeled as the core foundation of transmediale, there is room to expand upon and redefine what constitutes those terms. “How that cohesive bond manifests itself physically is basically dependent on those elements of form, function, concept and execution, and also a mix of fun,” explains Kovats. Due to the fact that topical themes of transmediale are rapidly changing, it becomes very difficult to predict the societal context twelve months ahead. “Last year we were actually dealing with Wikileaks, but in a whole other way,” continues Kovats. “We removed the focus that we once had on Wikileaks because of the shift of the global debate on Wikileaks, which ultimately took away from what Wikileaks is actually about. So instead we came back to looking at the web as the very basic construct through which Wikileaks, for example, is doing things the way they’re supposed to be happening online.”

transmediale Blog
by Melanie Sevcenko