Thirty years of transmediale: Excursions Interventions and Ecologies

Thirty years of transmediale: Excursions Interventions and Ecologies

February 17, 2017

Published:

February 17, 2017

Last Wednesday, transmediale continued the month-long program of ever elusive – thirty years of transmediale with the excursion Imaginaries at Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus which culminates in two performances and a talk by Laurie Anderson during the closing weekend (4–5 March 2017).

Before the closing weekend, transmediale moves further throughout the city with two upcoming excursions: Tomorrow’s excursion Interventions takes place at ver.di and Ecologies will be held at silent green Kulturquartier on 24 February 2017.

The Interventions excursion focuses on new approaches to immanent critique, opposition, and collective organization in relation to the crisis of datafied politics and digital populism. It examines the possibilities and constraints of critical empowerment when political parties, security agencies, and platform companies embrace disruptive practices and subversive strategies. As part of the program, the artist group UBERMORGEN gives a talk about “Binary Primitivism”. The term, coined by the group, promotes digital art aimed at simplifying depictions of machine aesthetics and targets an artistic return to the pre-post Internet. UBERMORGEN demands the reconstruction and re-contextualization of the “primitive” figure in contemporary media culture, which is characterized by extreme divisions.

Diann Bauer, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Jonas Lund, Sebastian Olma, and Sebastian Schmieg participate in the panel On Subversion and Beyond: Reconsidering the Politics of Resistance and Interference, moderated by Daphne Dragona. Panelists discuss possibilities for intervening in current political systems and pre-existing infrastructures, starting with interpretations of terms like subversion and disruption—once connected to artistic practice, as well as network research and hacktivism, they have now become integral parts of economic models, and the rise of digital populism. The evening ends with a delegate assembly within the framework of the Telekommunist International, commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the Putilov Strike in 1917 and the subsequent Russian Revolution. The Telekommunisten, a Berlin-based collective whose work investigates the political economy of communications technology, will engage attendees with the 100 year old vision in order to develop a new social agenda for the next 100 years.

More about the Interventions program here.

For the excursion Ecologies on 24 February 2017, transmediale moves to silent green Kulturquartier. The event features new artistic research into messy, disperse ecologies, which characterize planetary life, as it is re-constructed in flows of data, capital, and natural resources. In order to make the underlying planetary systems more tangible, the micro- and macro-political will be connected and the problematics of scale are brought to the foreground through talks, installations, a performance, and a workshop. The program also deals with the resource heavy realities of technology, its impact on the earth from a geological “deep time” perspective, and looks at new approaches to earth's native media such as mushrooms and rocks. Jamie Allen and Martin Howse from the artist group Shift Register will host another workshop. In the light of the shifts between industrialized capitalism and the knowledge afforded by techno-science, the group’s project maps human activities on earth, and registers indicators as ambiguous negotiations and signposts of planetary exhaustion. Their fieldwork translates earth media using a custom built Earth Lab—a research, workshop, and exhibition site made for publicly examining, presenting, and discussing their findings.

Martin Howse also performs the sound piece Terra Muta 000 within a dirty laboratory setting, giving voice to the silent earth, the crow, and the darkened earth worm (Lumbricus terrestris). Both the crow and the worm are creatures that give and take material voice from the earth, and are implicated mythically and materially within cycles of decay, death, and rebirth.

A feature talk with Art Laboratory Berlin inaugurates the new Mycelium Network Society including members Art bureau OPEN, Shu Lea Cheang, Katrīna Neiburga, Anil Podgornik, Saša Spačal, Mirjan Švagelj, and Taro. The underground network investigates fungi culture as “the neurological network of nature” because of its ability to communicate and process information. In our post-digital, post-media, post-internet, and post-enlightenment era, the group considers mycelium as a potential solution for strategizing new political tactics and salvaging economic meltdown.

More about the Ecologies excursion here.