Sister festivals transmediale and CTM come together this year for two shared performance programmes at the Miriam Makeba Auditorium of HKW. Incorporating the latest developments in generative AI, A/V storytelling, and data sonification to explore a conflictual past, present and future, the works offer personal, critical, and speculative reflections on how AI is facilitating new understanding and intimacies with our histories, with the world around us, and with one another?
The events are included in the transmediale festival pass, CTM festival pass, and Connect pass, but not in the transmediale Day passes.
20:30, 31 Jan, 2025
Miriam Makeba Auditorium, HKW
The Cost of Connection is a live audiovisual performance by Portrait XO that explores global challenges using AI and data sonification. Drawing on critical datasets from the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), she transforms data into sound and visuals to engage audiences with the complex issues facing our world.
Co-founder of Actual Objects, Rick Farin uses game engines and digital tools to craft speculative fictions blending live action, CG, AI, and VFX. In the AV-performance Chaos Play Live, original music by Farin is performed by a seemingly endless cast of digital characters, both CGI & AI generated, that take audiences into nether zones where human expression and machine artefact meld insolubly into each other to herald a new chaotic era in which fabrication and reality will be inseparable.
20:30, 1 Feb, 2025
Miriam Makeba Auditorium, HKW
Hulubalang’s work Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal mourns the marginalised figures of history, echoing the shattered innocence of disrupted rituals and the pain of unacknowledged sacrifices. The solo venture of Kasimyn—producer, DJ, label owner, and one-half of Gabber Modus Operandi—the project whose title roughly translates to Synthetic Feeling for Anonymous Sacrifice is a reflection on the emotions born out of a deep dive into Indonesian war archives.
Unpredictability is ZULI’s playground. From the edges of Cairo’s underground he emerged tearing through genres like a storm, his hard-edged textures and razor-sharp experiments too writhing to pin down. The live A/V performance of his recent album Lambda manifests as an electrifying interplay of tension, texture, and movement. Rooted in the precarious soundworld of the album, ZULI translates its swirling atmospheres and fractured rhythms into a multisensory experience, winding through a liminal space where sound is untethered from rhythm. Flickering unpredictably between chaos and clarity, intimacy and vastness, light and motion are mirrored in a fragmented chalice of guttural drones, ghostly falsettos, and pulverized strings as they twist and collide.
With light design by Andre Vanderwert and video material by Tomasz Skibicki and Sander Houtkruijer