transmediale 2024
you’re doing amazing sweetie
31 January to 4 February 2024

transmediale 2024 you’re doing amazing sweetie challenges the allure of unusable politics that spawn from cycles of consumption and distraction, questioning how language, relationships, and political possibilities transform into artifice through 100%, 24/7 access to content. Inspired by the reality of reality tv, the three-day festival investigates how we perform online as living content, and the atmosphere generated by constant flows of information. Complicated by algorithmic bias and commodification of attention, the festival explores our dependencies, addictions, and attachments to making, listening, and looking at content.

Unfolding across two venues – Season 1 and 2 in silent green Kulturquartier and the reunion in Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) – the festival’s programme features performances, conversations, film screenings, and exhibitions.

Oceanic Refractions , a ten-day installation at silent green, commissioned together with CTM Festival, constitutes the third part of the transmediale exhibition programme in 2024. This immersive sound installation is the result of a multi-year collaborative project initiated by AM Kanngieser (Australia/Germany) and Mere Nailatikau (Fiji) unfolding environmental relations in the ocean.

The main exhibition of the festival, this is perfect, perfect, perfect , at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, presents 13 artists who confront how stories are crafted, commerce is lived, and the never-ending trail of distraction. Uncensored Lilac is a collaborative exhibition of Ireland-based artists Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, who question the ways climate change affects and alters social and environmental relations.

Press Preview
30 January, 11:00
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien and silent green Kulturquartier

The press preview of transmediale 2024 takes place on 30 January in two parts: 11 am at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien for the exhibition this is perfect, perfect, perfect and at 2 pm at transmediale studio in silent green Kulturquartier for the studio exhibition Uncensored Lilac and the installation Oceanic Refractions in the Kuppelhalle.

Installation and performance
FASTER, HIGHER, STRONGER by Mary Maggic
3 February, HKW

FASTER, HIGHER, STRONGER is a performance and interactive installation where humans and non-humans train together to achieve the impossible fantasy of post-natural optimisation. Appropriating the official motto of the Olympics, “Faster, higher, stronger, together” three performers ride exercise bikes to supply energy to a bioreactor. As human muscles burn from the lactic acid buildup, kombucha is produced – a fermented liquid known as “the wellness drink of the 21st century”.

Performance
洪火机构 (The Office Agency of Flash Flood and Wildfire) by bela and Kloxii Li
1 February, silent green

As correspondents for the fictional meteorological agency, 洪火机构 (The Office Agency of Flash Flood and Wildfire), bela and Kloxii Li deliver a ceaseless stream of predictions for imminent flash floods and wildfires. Acting as oracles for these disconcerting narratives, they navigate the tumultuous landscape of climate uncertainty. Drawing inspiration from East Asian rain rituals and the experience of witnessing extreme weather in their homelands of South Korea and California, the duo’s performance explores visual forms of sensing, forecasting, and metabolising the realities of climate collapse.

Concert
Farida Amadou and guests
3 February, HKW

The festival concludes with a concert by Farida Amadou, a self-taught bassist from Brussels. The improvisational musician approaches the electric bass in a unique and distinctive way: in her hands, an electric bass is less a conventional instrument and more of a completely interpretable source of sound. With the help of effect pedals, Farida creates sonic landscapes ranging from introverted to powerful.

Performance
Crypto (Blue Marble) by Holly Childs and Gediminas Žygus
2 February, silent green

Exploring the mythologies on which corporate hegemonies are built, Crypto (Blue Marble) traces fantasies of empires with their undeniable ecological realities. A reckoning between billionaires and life itself, the performance questions the designed narrative of realities generated amidst a continuously evaporating world. This performance is defined by the search for a form to bind fiction, poetry, and musical experience, while its narrative is influenced by technical instructions, lectures and whispered conversations in which slippages and a floating focus creates new meanings in the listeners.

BETONHALLE, SILENT GREEN
Season 1 & 2
1–2 February 2024

The first two days of the festival – Season 1 and Season 2 – are dedicated to performances and conversations operating as confessionals, exploring the politics of erasure and censorship, girl economies, infrastructures of distraction, and the tensions between the real/unreal of digital authoritarianism. Operating through the gestures and tactics of performance, the Betonhalle of silent green will be transformed into an immersive space of performance, interventions, conversation, and film screenings.

Featuring Aleena Chia, Alex Quicho, Anna Engelhardt, bela and Kloxii Li, Clea Bourne, Eva Papamargariti, Holly Childs and Gediminas Žygus, Clea Bourne, Eva Papamargariti, Joel Sherwood Spring, Mario Santanilla, Rachel O'Dwyer, and Winnie Soon, with more to be announced.

HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT
Reunion
3 February 2024

Relocating to Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) on the third day the conclusion and reunion of the festival take place. The day-long reunion presents a series of conversations, performances, and screenings that explore the destruction of interconnected infrastructures and platforms, the ways interfaces restrict political possibilities, anti-fascist tactics, and the artifice of language.

Featuring Dubravka Sekulić, Georgina Voss, Helen Pritchard, Luiza Prado, Silvio Lorusso, and Svitlana Matviyenko, with more to be announced.

Pushing back against the numbness of politics generated through content, this year’s film programme questions how content filters reality, and algorithmic biases and viral hashtags generate an atmosphere of disconnection. Taking place at silent green and HKW, the programme features a selection of short films and feature film screenings, including a world premiere and several German and European premieres, alongside conversations with international filmmakers.

Featuring work by Anna Hawkins, Gala Hernández Lopez, Al Hassan Elwan, Kevin Brennan and Laurence Durkin, New Red Order, Riar Rizaldi, Su Hui-Yu, Monica Basbous and Charbel Alkhoury.

Kevin Brennan and Laurence Durkin will premiere their new film TerraForma (2023), the story of the remote volcanic island of Ascension, which sat smouldering for a million years entirely devoid of life, until its radical transformation by process of 'terraforming' into a tropical paradise.

Rethinking futurologist Alvin Toffler’s 1970s prophecy, Su Hui-Yu’s new feature film Future Shock (2023) blends ancient folklore, supernatural elements, and modern Taiwanese settings to weave a psychedelic and captivating narrative around modernity and its future visions. The work will be shown for the first time in Europe. A conversation with the artist will take place after the screening.

Installation – CTM x transmediale Cooperation
Oceanic Refractions
26 January – 4 February 2024
Kuppelhalle, silent green Kulturquartier

Oceanic Refractions is an immersive installation featuring testimonies of Fijian, i-Kiribati, and Papua New Guinean elders on kinship, self-determination, and care in the face of global ecocide. Along with reflections from these teachers, artists, fisherpeople, grandparents, and chiefs, we hear field recordings of Fiji's reefs, Kiribati's oceans and mangroves, and the shorelines of Papua New Guinea’s Duke of York Islands. Combining soundscape compositions with 360 videography, kinetic seating, and olfactory effects, the installation creates an unforgettable sensory experience and offers audiences rare insights into the environmental relations sustaining Oceania’s many worlds.

Commissioned by CTM x transmediale festivals, the work is led and produced by artists AM Kanngieser (Australia/Germany) and Mere Nailatikau (Fiji) and who combine their expertise in climate research, education and arts (Kanngieser) and Pacific communication and international relations (Nailatikau), as they work with sound artist KMRU (Kenya/Germany), filmmakers Laisiasa Dave Lavaki (Fiji), and Tumeli Tuqota (Fiji).