The net jargon acronym BWPWAP – Back When Pluto Was a Planet is an expression used whenever one wants to talk about things in our recent past that have changed quickly. On August 24th, 2006, at the closing ceremony of their general assembly, the International Astronomical Union infamously voted in favor of “demoting” Pluto from its planetary status. transmediale 2013 suggested that this classification crisis, spurred on by new technologies and shifting knowledge paradigms, opens up a rich space of cultural negotiation and artistic intervention.
Between shiny high-tech, e-waste dumps, big data businesses and mass surveillance schemes: Under the title afterglow, the 27th edition of transmediale explored our present post-digital moment as one in which former treasures of our mediatised life are turning into trash. International researchers, artists and activists focused on the ambivalent condition of current digital culture, looking towards a future in which media technologies have become part of daily life, turning into physical and immaterial waste.
For the first time in its history, the festival had a motto: STOCKTAKING VISION. They took stock of where television and all the new media have gotten us so far, and what they have given us.
Much of 20th century society strove to depict 2010 as a shining example of a future framed by technological progress and social harmony. But as 2010 arrived it was clear that global society was neither the utopia nor the dystopia traditionally presented. FUTURITY NOW! invited for the creation of new templates for the future and asked not what the future has in store for us, but what it is that we have in store for the future.
In our post-future era of acceleration and densification of information, the state and nature of being live and online becomes one of the crucial definers of our social presence. Response and action are compressed into an existential here and now triggering a durée of continuous digital stimulation. With RESPONSE:ABILITY transmediale.11 explored the emerging qualities of liveness as a fundamental nature of our present digital culture and discusses the abilities, that are required to respond to social, political and economic processes triggered by the intensity of our participation and interaction.
Incompatibility is the condition arising when things are not working together. Given the current worldwide proclamations of crisis, be they political, financial, technological or environmental, it may seem as if incompatible elements and situations are everywhere, that everything is failing. Ironically, it is the supposedly ever-more compatible media-scape, where everything connects, that render such crises instantly visible.
Looking beyond the alarmist scenarios of environmental, social and economic catastrophes to be expected in the wake of global warming, the essential question isn't that of how to avoid these processes, but to examine the need for a fundamental shift in cultural perception with respect to nature, culture and technology. With DEEP NORTH,transmediale.09 focused on the impact and unavoidable consequences of this pending global transformation - the crossing of a point of no return akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
The transmediale 00 festival occurred at the turn of the millenium: the whole world was speculating about major computer break downs, philosophies that go astray discovering never-imagined paths of cognitive territory, and the world took one step closer to its own doom. The world of media changed in so far as everything that used to exist on a material basis, such as newspapers, books and even the further technologized TV, was distributed digitally.
transmediale.01 wanted to turn passive media consumers into active producers: visitors should get the opportunity to experience artistic and media-technological strategies in order to give them the opportunity to create art by themselves, in situ. Thus, DIY [do it yourself!] reflected the emancipatory and self-empowering tendency of the digital era in media-artistic practices.
