From the spatial to the temporal, the intimate to the geopolitical – scale and its many technological manifestations have long been means for measuring and organising. As machine learning and automated tools become common, the scaling of images and representations fabricates and circulates realities. The politics of scaling can contest established hierarchies of information by favouring certain representations over others. A conspiracy theory spreads simultaneously at multiple scales. A hologram of the Queen attempts to reignite public favour for a nation in decline. A smartphone operates planetary-scale logistics. A text prompt can generate a million images.

The 2023 transmediale festival will explore the scalar politics and tactics at stake, questioning how the instrumentalisation and affect of scale can be challenged. a model, a map, a fiction begins with an opening evening of exhibition, performance, and music and is followed by four days of discourse, artistic interventions, and workshops. Opening alongside the festival on 1 February, an exhibition featuring Alan Butler and Simone C Niquille will be on view in Akademie der Künste until 26 February. Alongside the festival week, a citywide exhibition, Out of Scale, takes place from 26 January to 26 February. Further details on the evening programme and collaboration with CTM Festival will be announced shortly.

Taking place across four days, the festival’s discourse programme brings together international artists, researchers, performers, and thinkers for a series of conversations, lectures, panels, performances, demos, film, and workshops.

Demos offered by Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich and others draw upon the legacy of the demoscene as they share methodological insights into their infrastructural investigations. Hannah Jayanti and Alexander Porter’s lecture performance, Strata, will take us to the Badlands of South Dakota. As they descend into nuclear silos and watch a Blackfooted ferret sleeping, landscapes reveal themselves through perspectives of time, species, and histories.

Made of moments of gathering and collective activation, recording sessions around Nicole L’Huillier’s installation La Orejona will take place across four days. The audience will be invited to collective performances of cañitas and screaming sessions.

This year’s film programme features a selection of short films by Nina Davies, Graeme Arnfield, Lex Brown, Ryan Jeffery, 업체eobchae, and many more. On Saturday evening, a new feature film – The Signal Line by French filmmaker Simon Ripoll-Hurier – investigates a secret CIA programme on psychic vision and extrasensory perception. Situated between divination and espionage, the sci-fi documentary explores the possibility of perceiving the invisible, of seeing through walls, bodies, time, and space and sharing these visions.

Dispersed across the building, a series of artistic interventions consider new scalar tactics through practice-based approaches. Featuring newly commissioned work by transmediale residents 2022 Antonia Hernández and Laura Cugusi, fantastic little splash (Lera Malchenko and Oleksandr Hants), Marc Lee, and Nicole L’Huillier, with more to be announced. The projects were developed during the residency in Berlin and are presented for the first time at the festival.

The annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture – the prelude to the festival – takes place on 31 January at the Embassy of Canada in Berlin. This year’s McLuhan Lecture is held by Svitlana Matviyenko, a key figure in digital militarism and Professor of Critical Media Analysis at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her lecture will explore nuclear cyberwar and energy terrorism and the scale of its ecological impact.

This collaborative exchange between Alan Butler and Simone C Niquille interrogates the technical and socio-political implications of computervision technologies. A simulation of an extreme weather report of a never-ending storm is interrupted by duckrabbit – the star of an animated TV series – who tells their queer coming-of-age story of self-discovery and their struggles with vision technologies. Roaming through California’s Yosemite National Park, the news reporter screams My First Summer in the Sierra (1869), an account of ‘nature writing’ by John Muir, in defiance of the storm, while duckrabbit ponders their desires for ambiguity in a world composited and remade with CGI assets. As these worlds begin to collide and blur, their uncanny representations come apart at the seams. Questioning the gaps between the realities generated by CGI and simulation technologies and their high-resolution capturing of the present, the exhibition asks how we hold together when the line between impending doom and entertainment becomes unclear. The exhibition features the premiere of two new video works by Alan Butler and Simone C Niquille.

Alongside the festival, transmediale presents the free citywide exhibition Out of Scale. Distributed and embedded across eBay Kleinanzeigen, Tempelhofer Feld, transmediale warehouse, and the city’s Spätis and U-Bahn, the exhibition challenges the optimised image of the city as generated by the algorithmic process that scales across networks and platforms. Featuring work from over twenty international and Berlin-based artists, interventions explore the city’s networks, questioning our reliance on the technological organisation of the city, generating new perspectives through enquiries into environmental ruin, bio-surveillance politics, anti-colonial resistance, and other-thanhuman identities.

The 2023 festival edition is curated by Nora O Murchú (artistic director of transmediale), Bani Brusadin, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Lorena Juan, Ben Evans James, and Jussi Parikka (curatorial advisor) and made by the transmediale team.