transmediale 2024
you’re doing amazing sweetie
31 January to 4 February 2024
Exploring the horror of content that consumes more and more of the internet user's attention and the world's resources, the 37th edition of transmediale examines how the logics of content production determine and frustrate our relations to technology. The 2024 edition features exhibitions, performances, screenings, and conversations that challenge the unusable politics that are generated through the surfaces of screens. Examining how these politics are deployed through tactics of distraction, propaganda, and control, the festival will reveal how language, relations, and political possibilities become artifice through 24/7 access to content.
Inspired by the reality of reality TV, the three-day programme will take place in silent green Kulturquartier and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, alongside the festival’s main exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien on view over two months.
Detailed information on the discourse programme as well as on performance and film will be announced soon.
this is perfect, perfect, perfect
31 January to 14 April 2024
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
Featuring works by Alice Brygo, Aram Bartholl, Avril Corroon, Jenkin van Zyl, Juan Obando and Yoshua Okón, Laura Lulika, Luke van Gelderen, Maria Guta & Lauren Huret, Ndayé Kouagou, Noura Tafeche, and Sungsil Ryu.
Distraction, once a consequence, has become central to our algorithm-mediated realities – shaping language, identities, behaviour, and action. Scrolling, clicking, and swiping through loops of content has produced endless distraction, transforming bathrooms into stages, bedrooms into studios, and life into content.
Dissecting the hyperbolic, sensational, and often anxiety-inducing images and narratives that are generated on our screens, this is perfect, perfect, perfect grinds on the seamless smooth shiny surface, cracking it open – with a smile – to reveal the operations and logics of content and their never-ending toxicity at work. The festival’s main exhibition brings together 13 artists and takes place at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien.
Uncensored Lilac
26 January to 14 April 2024
transmediale studio, silent green Kulturquartier
A group of goddesses and their assembly of familiars, pets, servants, and technologies are lounging. These women are hot. These women are bored. These women are plotting. They generate heat and they seek revenge.
Commissioned for transmediale 2024, Uncensored Lilac is an exhibition by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan. Taking place at transmediale studio, the artists will transform the studio into the fantasy world of a group of goddesses and their familiars. Set in a dreamlike hallucinatory landscape that constantly mutates, the assembly has been invaded and altered by the toxicity of climate collapse, making them nurturing but venomous. Questioning how we embody and are altered by climate collapse, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan will present a new CGI film alongside a new series of 3D prints, paintings, and sculptures.
The exhibition is part of Zeitgeist Ireland 24, an initiative of Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland in Germany.
Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2024: Cory Doctorow
29 January 2024
Embassy of Canada in Berlin
This year's Marshall McLuhan lecture will be given by the Canadian-British journalist and author Cory Doctorow. In his talk, Doctorow will discuss the enshittification of the internet – an inevitable result of policy choices made in living memory. Exploring how an assemblage of technical, social, and economic factors foster "interoperability" he discusses how the internet can be reclaimed. Cory Doctorow is an acclaimed author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing and has published several books. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organisation, using some of its licences for his books.
The annual lecture is a collaboration between the Embassy of Canada in Berlin and transmediale festival and opens this year's festival week on 29 January at the Embassy. Throughout the last years, the lecture series hosted speakers like Svitlana Matviyenko, Phanuel Antwi, and Jody Berland.
transmediale is an annual festival and a critical space for the development of experimental approaches to art and digital culture. Beyond the yearly event, transmediale is a transversal, dynamic platform that facilitates year-round activities, including a residency programme and journal. Each festival edition focuses on a specific theme in the spectrum of art and digital culture that is reflected through a variety of programmes like exhibitions, discourse formats, performances, screenings, and workshops.
