The 2012 edition of transmediale takes place in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) January 31 – February 5, 2012 exploring the theme of in/compatible. As a festival exploring transdisciplinary critical and speculative positions in art, technology and culture, transmediale is always in transformation.
Below is a short summary of what has been and what is to come. If you have further questions, please connect to the new IRC channel where you will also be able to follow the work-process until 2012.
http://www.transmediale.de/
TRANSMEDIALE IS AN IN/COMPATIBLE BEING
The 2012 edition of transmediale explores the theme of in/compatible. tm.12 postulates that incompatible beings drive the logic of contemporary cultural production. We understand in/compatible beings as aesthetic things and processes that do not necessarily connect on the terms we are used to. The festival wants to raise the question of what happens when such incompatible beings are brought to the fore rather than hidden away in the dark underbelly of digital culture?
tm.12 will mark the 25 year anniversary of the festival, to be reflected in a program that both looks back at the festival’s role in the past and at the same time redefines what it could be in the future. Born as VideoFilmFest in 1988, the festival was from the beginning an outlet for the kind of hybrid artistic and activist practices that did not fit in at the regular film festivals. In this sense the in/compatible theme is also a reflection on the festival as such, always searching for new questions and formats.
FESTIVAL IN TRANSFORMATION
transmediale Award RIP! For the 2012 festival there will be no general transmediale Award. This change reflects our new ways of producing the festival: adopting the thematic approach early on we aim at curatorial coherence across the different programme sections and at the same time we wish to engage more directly in our community.
Consequently, the call for tm.12 is tied to a thematic rather than an Award competition resulting in an Open Call for Works and the Vilém Flusser Theory Award now takes the form of a residency programme for artistic research. For 2012 there will be no Open Web Award, but the critical discussion of the politics of open and closed systems will continue in new formats.
The decisions to cancel the transmediale and the Open Web Award are also connected to the development of a new project, “resource”, an all-year project working as a form of distributed project residency for transmediale’s local, regional and international community. As a combination of networking, research and curating, the resource is a new framework for festival related projects that happens throughout the year. The launch of the resource will take place in 2012 and will in itself be an important feature of the 25th anniversary, looking into the future while acknowledging the importance of the festival as an accessible and dynamic forum for the translocal media art scene as well as for interdisciplinary cultural producers and researchers.
tm.12 in/compatible is brought to you by a team comprising of fresh and veteran transmediale forces: Kristoffer Gansing is our new artistic director as of April this year, Tatiana Bazzichelli steps in to command the resource project, Jacob Lillemose will be helming the exhibition all the while Marcel Schwierin for the third time presents the film and video programme. Markus Huber continues as programme manager, Filippo Gianetta as marketing whiz, Christine Bernauer as budget mastermind with assistance from Susanne Bernstein who also coordinates our new tm archive project. TBC as our team expands in the coming months.
In Summer 2010 the Advisory Board of transmediale reformed itself and since then the following members support the development of transmediale with words and deeds: Prof. Dr. Dieter Daniels (chair), Dr. Marie Cathleen Haff, Prof. Dr. Marie-Luise Angerer, Alex Adriaansens, Jan Edler, Hortensia Völckers.
TM.12 – CALL FOR WORKS!
Open Call for Works 2012
Vilém Flusser Residency Programme 2012
Deadline: August 31 2011
The selected works will form part of our extensive exhibition, screening, performance and conference programme. Projects may also be entered for the Vilém Flusser Residency Programme (formerly Award), taking the form of a 2 month artistic research residency jointly run by tm and Universität der Künste in Berlin.
OPEN CALL FOR WORKS 2012
With the conceptual framework of in/compatible we are looking for artistic works in any genre and format that either explicitly or in more subtle ways engage the incompatible nature of contemporary technological cultures. We imagine that these works rather than anticipating resolution, address, accentuate and invest in the unresolved tensions across translocal media practices and systems. In particular we are calling for works take us by surprise by not quite “fitting in”.
Works taken into consideration for the program can be related to the following keywords and areas:
Dissensual aesthetics, hacktivism, operating systems, speculative realisms, queer technologies, strange ontologies, displacements, ecologies, psychedelia(s), glitches, spam, media-archaeologies, technological obsolescence, haunted media, reverse remediations, the untimely, erotics, ambivalences, tools, law, anxieties, confusions, violence, obscurities, junk, addictions, restlessness, user-unfriendliness, destructions, attractions, surveillance, accidents, dysfunctionality, isolation, punk, feedback as distortion, surrealisms, aggressiveness, the uncommon, frustrations, spiritualities, risks, dubious calculations, psychosis, uneven structures, crimes.
Read about the full conceptual framework, the application procedure and the Conditions of Entry: http://www.transmediale.de/festival/call-for-works
VILÉM FLUSSER RESIDENCY PROGRAMME 2012
For Vilém Flusser theory and praxis are intrinsically tied to each other. His nomadic thinking was shaped by a philosophy of positions, the experimental testing of different ways of thinking and the linking of different disciplines and methodologies played a significant role for him.
The newly organised Vilém Flusser Residency Programme supports projects and activities which are simultaneously conceptual and practice-based. The programme is geared towards the initiation of new research or to the further development of existing projects. This is not a production grant and while a public presentation/event will be expected, there is no pressure to present finished works. Where applicable, the support of publications, exhibitions, interventions and other results of the residency may be negotiated on a project to project basis. Special priority will be given to young and/or emerging artist-researchers.
We are calling upon artistic research to actively explore the capabilities and limitations of transdisciplinary and transmedial situations in contemporary culture and thus to understand artistic research as exploring the links between aesthetics, materiality and politics.
Read the full conceptual framework, about the application procedure and the Conditions of Entry: http://www.transmediale.de/award/vilem-flusser-award
CTM.12 – SPECTRAL
The thirteenth edition of CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Arts takes place parallel to and in cooperation with transmediale between 30th January and 5th February 2012, at various venues in Berlin. CTM is dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music and sound art, as well as the diverse range of artistic activities and social practices that develop within and connect to those audio cultures. The festival reflects on the agency of contemporary sound creation within the cultural fabric of society and its technological and social transformations. It explores these intersections with other art forms and cultural fields.
With the theme Spectral, CTM.12 dedicates itself to the musical and medial visitations of rejected past aesthetics and their unredeemed utopias or dystopias, the uncanniness of media’s hallucinatory effects as well as the quest for experiences of transcendence. DIY-media-archaeology, the exploration of the deep material structures of sounds, media and archives, the offensive recourse on past aesthetics to the point of the archaic, a visible superimposition of different temporalities, psychotropy, occult media, private mysticism, deception, mundane alchemy or specific forms of negativity as an at times bitter, at times euphoric rejection of the presence – these all provide points of entry into current constructions of reality, to respectively adjure or exorcise the inherent ghosts.
Projects and works can be submitted as proposals by 31st August for CTM’s music, performance, discourse, workshop or exhibition programme. Detailed information can be found on the CTM-website from June 16 on: http://www.clubtransmediale.de/ctm-festival.
