Digital systems address us in ways that engender a ‘performance of proximity’: a choreographed algo-rhythm that shapes our politics, our labour, and our relations to one another through the smoothed interfaces of our devices. From ASMR battles with whispered trash talk to children who speak to their parents like Alexa, from e-girls selling their bathwater to skin-riding robots serving your drinks, algorithms reform our human need for connection by advancing new proximities as a replacement for the closeness we yearn for in the times we live in.

For transmediale’s 38th edition, (near) near but — far will form an understanding of how algorithms place us in weird proximities and new intimacies with one another and the qualities of closeness we lose by way of their machine-driven actions. By attending to the affects of proximity and closeness, the festival will reach beyond constructing a dichotomy of the two terms to ask: how can the capacities of technologies foster relations better adapted to responding to the complexities of our individual and collective discontents?

transmediale 2025 follows a renewed curatorial approach, shaping both the festival’s theme and programming methodology. Two curators, Ben Evans James and Elise Misao Hunchuck , lead the thematic focus and curatorial research. Additionally, they have invited a group of programmers – artist and performer Nina Davies , editor-researcher Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung , and trans*disciplinary artist-designer Ren Loren Britton – to contribute to the festival. transmediale is further expanding collaborations with its long-standing partners: Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton, Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) at Aarhus University, Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the Media Studies (EMW) at University of Potsdam & University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.