transmediale 2015 CAPTURE ALL announces programme and further participant highlights
Press Preview: 27 January 2015, 12:00 Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles Allee 10, 10557 Berlin
Press Accreditation: Accreditation applications for press are accepted until 15 January 2015.
Press Kit: In our press kit you’ll find further information about this year’s festival as well as press images.
Berlin, 16.12.2014
Following the programme announcement from last month, we are pleased to unveil further participants from the realms of art, culture and media, gathering for transmediale 2015 CAPTURE ALL, again supported by Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt from 28 January to 1 February 2015.
The full programme will soon be available online at www.transmediale.de/capture-all.
Art is Open Source (AOS) (Oriana Persico [it] & Salvatore Iaconesi [it]), Kim Asendorf (de), Timo Arnall (uk), Nadav Assor (us), LaTurbo Avedon, Aram Bartholl (de), Ryan Bishop (us), Zach Blas (us), Myriam Bleau (ca), Benjamin H. Bratton (us), Mercedes Bunz (de), Mark Butler (at/us), Revital Cohen (uk/be), Jordan Crandall (us), David Darts (us), Irineu Destourelles (pt), Heather Dewey-Hagborg (us), Eastwood - Real Time Strategy Group (hr/rs), Teboho Edkins (us), Antje Ehmann (de), Greg Elmer (uk/ca), Mathias Fuchs (de), Furtherfield (Ruth Catlow [uk] & Marc Garrett [uk]), Dominic Gagnon (ca), Carolin Gerlitz (de), Goodiepal (dk), Stephen Graham (uk), Hacklander (us) \ Hatam (us) with Fredrik Olofsson (se), Adnan Hadzi, Ellie Harrison (uk), Anne Helmond (nl), Louis Henderson (uk), Derek Howard (ca), Tehching Hsieh (tw), Edward J. Keller (us), Sarah Kember (uk), Simon Klose (se), Christina Kral (de), Maria Kramar (ru), Ganaele Langlois (ca), Patrick Lichty (us), Jonas Lund (se), Nicolas Maigret (fr) & Brendan Howell (us), Sam Meech (uk), Lorna Mills (ca), Karen Mirza (uk), Robyn Moody (ca), Jennifer Lyn Morone (us), Evgeny Morozov (by), Mushon Zer-Aviv (il), Dionysia Mylonaki (gr), Arash Nassiri (fr), David Orrell (ca), Jussi Parikka (fi), Matteo Pasquinelli (it), Laurel Ptak (us), People Like Us (uk), Tobias Revell (uk), Annick Rivoire (fr), Ned Rossiter (au), Antoinette Rouvroy (be), Paolo Ruffino - IOCOSE (it), Erica Scourti (gr), Sebastian Schmieg (de) & Silvio Lorusso (it), Trebor Scholz (de), Shu Lea Cheang (tw), Felix Stalder (ch), Mike Stubbs (uk), Tiziana Terranova (it), unMonastery, Tuur Van Balen (uk), Ben Vickers (uk), Klaus vom Bruch (de), Christian von Borries (de), Judy Wajcman (uk), Oliver Walker (uk), Jennifer Whitson (ca), McKenzie Wark (au), Anne-Cécile Worms (fr)
WORKSHOP PROGRAMME
At the center of the festival is a living workspace developed in cooperation with raumlaborberlin and featuring a rich programme of workshops, discussions and project presentations. Here, artists, researchers and technology activists engage the audience to form constructive responses to the dilemmas posed by the CAPTURE ALL society. The international collective unMonastery will work throughout the festival to address topics such as how to build sustainable livelihoods and public resources in times of recession; practitioners such as David Darts, Adnan Hadzi and Aram Bartholl will present alternative network infrastructures that function as “off-the-cloud” spaces for autonomous communication. A group of hackers, artists and researchers will discuss feminist methodologies and approaches interrogating the gender politics of networking technologies and their associated social practices. The project Ubiquitous Commons will work on how citizens can gain access to and work with big data in order to claim this as a common resource rather than an exclusive property of data-mining companies. Each day, projects, groups and collectives will set different thematic focuses in a setting that transforms the bleak outlook of CAPTURE ALL into a platform for knowledge building and informed future action. Methodologies, manifestos, toolkits, autonomous networks and user-controlled platforms will point towards the significance of a different living paradigm and an emergent culture that lies beyond the CAPTURE ALL logic of measurement and control.
EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
The exhibition programme of transmediale 2015 consists of the CAPTURE ALL exhibition as well as a special edition of Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life, shown for the first time in Liverpool in 2013-2014.
CAPTURE ALL
The CAPTURE ALL exhibition, curated by Daphne Dragona and Robert Sakrowski, presents artistic positions that respond to the asymmetries and the misconceptions of a datafying world. The works particularly focus on the ambiguous relationship and uncanny tension between the user and the algorithm, the self and the constantly evolving apparatus. In his work FTFY (Fixed That For You), Jonas Lund generates the “perfect” transmediale exhibition out of several exhibition related facts from the last years with the help of an algorithm written by the artist himself.
With Mercenary Cubiclists, British artist Tobias Revell tells the story of the fictive British town Galtham. In this dystopian smart city, the residents have been turned into digital slaves who work with objects connected in a common game.
Sebastian Schmieg’s and Silvio Lorusso’s Networked Optimization shows alternative versions of popular self-help books that are entirely made out of the passages most commonly underlined by Kindle users and which are at the same time stored in Amazon’s data centers.
For her video work Body Scan Erica Scourti takes photographs of her body using an iPhone app and then further performs a set of correlations between them and corresponding search results.
Timo Arnall’s Internet Machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of the Internet. The film reveals the hidden materiality of our data by exploring some of the machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed.
With the big data oracle Stakhanov, Oriana Persico and Salvatore Iaconesi of the international network Art is Open Source will harvest social networks for information and data, making connections, assumptions, correlations, using them to predict the future.
Artists: Timo Arnall, Art is Open Source (AOS): Oriana Persico + Salvatore Iaconesi, LaTurbo Avedon, Zach Blas, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Eastwood - Real Time Strategy Group, Jonas Lund, Jennifer Lyn Morone, Tobias Revell, Sebastian Schmieg & Silvio Lorusso, Erica Scourti
Time and Motion: Redefining Working Life
Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life will be the second exhibition within the framework of transmediale 2015 CAPTURE ALL. Produced by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool) in 2013, it is now presented as a special edition linked to the festival theme.
Time & Motion uses artworks, research projects, archival materials and interventions to track our journey through the world of work, from clocking on at the factory gates to checking in online from our home office. At a time of structural changes in the labour market and sharp transitions in business practice to address global recession, the exhibition asks timely questions including ‘What happened to the eight hour day?’, ‘What is your work life balance?’ and ‘How has technology affected the way that you work?’
A cooperation between transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, FACT, Royal College of Art, Creative Exchange Hub and Schering Stiftung.
After the festival, Time & Motion will run parallel to the exhibition Labour in a Single Shot by the late Harun Farocki, until 6 April 2015.
Artists: Tuur Van Balen, Revital Cohen, Ellie Harrison, Tehching Hsieh, Sam Meech, Oliver Walker
Curators: Mike Stubbs and Emily Gee, FACT, Liverpool
On 22 January 2015, 19:00, the partner exhibition assemble | standard | minimal by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen opens at Schering Stiftung, Berlin. Cohen and Van Balen translate our times of automated and standardized production technologies into performative installations, provocative objects, and subtly aestheticized documentary films. The exhibition runs until 3 May 2015.
PERFORMANCE PROGRAMME
This year’s performance programme encompasses audiovisual pieces in the tradition of live-cinema and intermedia works that defy easy categorisation. The performances reflect how controlling technological structures now govern our lives, and work to playfully subvert them.
Among the highlights is the world premiere Citation City by People Like Us as well as Nicolas Maigret’s and Brendan Howell’s The Pirate Cinema.
Citation City consists of 300 major feature films where content is either filmed or set in London, creating a story within a story, of the film world, living its life, through extraordinary times of change, to see what happens when these multiple narratives are combined.
The Germany premiere of The Pirate Cinema depicts the topology of digital media consumption and uncontrolled content dissemination in a connected world by projecting Peer-to-Peer transfers happening in real time on networks using the BitTorrent protocol.
With Myriam Bleau’s Toys of the Future, transmediale shows a Europe premiere: In the music performance the artist performs with four spinning tops built with clear acrylic that react to musical algorithms with varying light halos.
Colin Hacklander, Farahnaz Hatam und Fredrik Olofsson present Levels of Intrusion in which stroboscopic control systems, ancient and modern encryption methods, live twitter streams and texts such as Edward Snowden’s 2013 Moscow Statement meet percussion.
In the world-premiere of Goodiepal’s three-day performance installation El Camino Del Hardcore - DJ. Audio $var I day, the artists invites the audience to interact with the live rendition of his publication The Way of the Hardcore which is here developed further into a project of “leaving the internet”, a task that in its near-impossibility becomes a poetic act of personal resistance to CAPTURE ALL.
Among the participants are: Myriam Bleau, Goodiepal, Hacklander \ Hatam with Fredrik Olofsson, Nicolas Maigret & Brendan Howell, People Like Us
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
The conference programme of transmediale 2015, curated by Kristoffer Gansing and Daphne Dragona, raises the question what it means to live in an algorithmic world and examines how the desired ‘full take’ shapes the contemporary lived environment following the streams life, play and work.
Central motifs are amongst others datafication, quantification, gamification, self-optimization, self-commodification and the dissolving boundary between work and play.
In Your Future at Work: Logistics, Rights and Dilemmas, Trebor Scholz, Ned Rossiter and Laurel Ptak discuss possibilities to evade the technologies of complete data capturing in the realm of work and the question of new forms of organisation.
Edward J. Keller, Jordan Crandall, Benjamin H. Bratton, Tiziana Terranova and Ryan Bishop present speculative case studies and scenarios for a technological future of capture in The Post-Planetary Design: A Speculative Sense: From the perspectives of design, theory and economy, they are looking at the resulting techno-political situation with its own worlds of sense, accountability and governance.
Starting from the new game form “play commons”, Ruth Catlow in conversation with Christina Kral examines how the P2P logic and shared visions for the world can be used to construct playful yet possible scenarios for the future of social and urban spaces in Play as a Commons: practical utopias & P2P futures.
In Becoming Data-Point, Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois, Anne Helmond, Jussi Parikka and Carolin Gerlitz ask for the ethical, political and economic implications of the user as aggregator of data flows.
Matteo Pasquinelli, Antoinette Rouvroy and Evgeny Morozov discuss why and how algorithms rule societies; the panel All watched over by algorithms will shed light on some of the main misconceptions of what can be framed as algorithmic governance.
Stephen Graham, Sarah Kember und Tobias Revell are trying to find an answer to the question of what situations and relations of self, work, leisure and everyday life are emerging in the paradigm of the Smart City in Predict & Command: Cities of Smart Control.
As part of a special series of late night talks, the American media artist, theorist and performer Jordan Crandall will first perform and then together with Ryan Bishop, discuss an excerpt of his “philosophical theatre” Unmanned that is about autonomous, automated systems such as drones, and how we humans become positioned within such systems.
The conference programme is partly developed in cooperation with the Winchester School of Art.
Among the participants are: Ryan Bishop, Benjamin H. Bratton, Mercedes Bunz, Mark Butler, Ruth Catlow, Jordan Crandall, Greg Elmer, Mathias Fuchs, Marc Garrett, Carolin Gerlitz, Stephen Graham, Anne Helmond, Edward J. Keller, Sarah Kember, Simon Klose, Christina Kral, Ganaele Langlois, Evgeny Morozov, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Jussi Parikka, Matteo Pasquinelli, Laurel Ptak, Annick Rivoire, Ned Rossiter, Antoinette Rouvroy, Paolo Ruffino - IOCOSE, Erica Scourti, Nishant Shah, Trebor Scholz, Shu Lea Cheang, Felix Stalder, Mike Stubbs, Tiziana Terranova, Judy Wajcman, McKenzie Wark, Jennifer Whitson, Anne-Cécile Worms
FILM AND VIDEO PROGRAMME
Curated by Marcel Schwierin, the films and videos featured in transmediale 2015 focus on subjects like self-optimisation, self-presentation, internet, internet videos, drones, surveillance, capitalism, terrorism, crime and language.
CAPTURE ALL is a schizophrenic condition for the camera. On the one hand, it is a tool for the complete capture of people, be it through face recognition or be it through drones. On the other hand, it is totally useless when it comes to the evaluation of the data collected – the age of the algorithm is per se invisible to it. The films and videos of transmediale 2015 illuminate the CAPTURE ALL theme from four perspectives: optimisation of the own body and communication, the Internet as a map-everything information machine, the global Moment of Fear versus the ideology of happiness, and the increase in electronic manipulation.
The British artist duo Karen Mirza & Brad Butler reflect on the so-called Mumbai attacks of 2008 in The Unreliable Narrator. Tapped phone calls between terrorist during the assaults, videos from CCTVs and the processing of the attacks in numerous Bollywood films create a new narrative of horror which thematises the medial full take between surveillance, fear and voyeurism.
Teboho Edkins will be present for the screening of Gangster Project which was selected for the Sundance festival and awarded at the festival Africano de Córdoba: In the film Edkins stages himself – a young white director with the intention to shoot a film with thugs of the most dangerous neighbourhood of Cape Town. His central protagonists were killed in a shoot-out a few months after the film shooting.
A total of 44 films and videos from 1937 to 2014, among them 13 premieres, are to be shown in eight programmes and two installations, each programme with its own sub-theme.
Present artists: Nadav Assor, Christian von Borries, Irineu Destourelles, Teboho Edkins, Antje Ehmann, Dominic Gagnon, Louis Henderson, Derek Howard, Maria Kramar, Patrick Lichty, Karen Mirza, Dionysia Mylonaki, Arash Nassiri, Klaus vom Bruch
In addition to the film and video programme, transmediale in collaboration with ARTE Creative presents the world premiere of the transmedia project World Brain by French artists and scientists Gwenola Wagon and Stéphane Degoutin. The 70-minute essayistic film as well as the interactive website take the visitors on a dive through the physical shoals of the Internet. World Brain explores the utopian dreams and ideologies connected to the development of collective intelligence and the idea of a worldwide network. arte.tv/worldbrain
NETWORK PROGRAMME
For the pre-festival programme Vorspiel, transmediale and CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music and Art collaborate with the Berlin network of project spaces, galleries and independent cultural actors in the field of digital art & culture and experimental sound & music for a distributed programme of partner events that are reacting to the festival themes CAPTURE ALL and Un Tune from 9 January to 1 February 2015.
This distributed programme aims at strengthening the dialogue between the two festivals as well as fostering the network of cultural actors and institutions, which has been established over the last years. As part of transmediale’s reSource for transmedial culture Berlin, the all-year programme of transmediale, it connects different genres and practices for creating opportunities of common exchange and reflection and for bringing together communities and individuals which are reflecting on the changing relations between art, technology, politics and identity.
Canadian mathematician and publicist David Orrell, a mathematician specialising in systems economics and author of best-selling studies such as Apollo's Arrow: The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything delivers this year’s Marshall McLuhan Lecture at the Embassy of Canada on 27 January. Orrell is known for his critiqe of neoclassical economics and its over belief in statistical prediction.
In connection with the lecture, the McLuhan Salon will open with a solo exhibition by Canadian media and Internet artist Lorna Mills, who presents a series of her signature animated GIF work. On 31 January, the Salon will also host the German premiere of Ways of Something, an anthology film featuring 58 net artists curated by Lorna Mills as a remake of an episode from John Berger’s classic BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing (1972).
The event is in English; the entry is free after registration.
transmediale Marshall McLuhan Lecture is a cooperation between transmediale and the Embassy of Canada in Berlin.
A press release presenting the Vorspiel pre-festival programme will be sent out in January.
Press dates, press kit, printable press images and online accreditation form are available in our press section under http://www.transmediale.de/press.
transmediale is a project by Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH in collaboration with Haus der Kulturen der Welt. It is funded as a cultural institution of excellence by Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation).
Tabea Hamperl
press@transmediale.de
tel: +49 (0)30 24 749 792
http://www.transmediale.de/