Tag: Berlin Transmediale Festival

Transmediale 2019 Programme Updates

This year’s Transmediale programme is shaping up well.

31 Jan – 3rd Feb HKW, Berlin

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“Transmediale 2019 focuses on the role of emotions, empathy, and cultural emergence in digital culture. Responding to this thematic focus, it aims to create an environment for the emergence of experiences and knowledge that goes beyond the limited time frame of the public festival days. The newly introduced transmediale Study Circles have already started in October 2018 and not only offer a space for reflection and in-depth exploration of some of the festival’s key questions, they generate various outputs which frame and form a part of transmediale 2019’s core program. This approach is also reflected in an accompanying documentation through the transmediale/journal, which will feature two new online issues taking up central topics of the two Study Circles’ thematic strands Affective Infrastructures and Uneasy Alliances.”

“Besides established event types such as keynotes, performances, and short film screenings, participatory and educational formats play a significant role at transmediale 2019: The workshop program is extended and starts—together with the new transmediale Student Forum—already two days before the festival officially opens.”

Check programme updates here: https://2019.transmediale.de/program

transmediale 2019 HKW, Berlin

Very pleased to say I’ve been invited to talk and take part in a panel at the next transmediale in Berlin.  The blurb (below) looks fantastic! “New technologies of feeling”, “structures of feeling”… The programme will be out soon.

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transmediale
31 Jan – 03 Feb
2019
HKW, Berlin

transmediale 2019 focuses on how feelings are made into objects of technological design and asks what role emotions and empathy play within digital culture. One of the key questions of the upcoming festival is “What moves you?”, referring not only to an emotional response but also to the infrastructures and aesthetics that govern how affect becomes mobilized as a political force today.

With digital technologies being integrated into the liveness of experience, a new situation for social change and cultural practice has arisen, which currently seems to lead to either political extremes or extreme complacency. How to resist the manipulative and polarizing aspects of affect in the digital public sphere as it is expressed through a deadlock of the politics of feeling on the one side and disengagement on the other? What motivates social engagement and how can new forms of care and solidarity be developed and embodied?

For the first time in many years, the festival does not have a title in order to emphasize the possibility of emergence: In response to a critical time, transmediale wants to focus on live practices and the creation of learning environments rather than close down meaning.

Taking up the challenge of how to understand and work with new technologies of feeling, transmediale recognizes that digital culture has become instrumental for capturing and managing what Raymond Williams once called “structures of feeling”—lived experiences and cultural expressions, distinct from supposedly fixed social products and institutions. Such experiences and expressions now create the affective spaces of social media, form the design imperatives of artificial intelligence applications, and seem to be capable of evoking empathy through virtual reality. In these contexts, social and political issues tend to become emotionalized and get turned into binary choices of for and against. One of the contemporary challenges is how to be critical and affirmative at the same time while avoiding such oversimplifications. For this purpose, transmediale 2019 strives to feature living, and not yet fully formed digital cultures of artistic vision, speculative thinking, activist intervention, and counter-cultural dreaming.

Following its focus on cultural emergence, the 2019 festival aims for a high level of participant and audience engagement through discussion-based and educational formats: Preceding the public festival days transmediale offers a workshop program as well as a new student platform to create an environment for concentrated, in-depth work and studying. Furthermore, a new format called “Study Circles” is integrated across the program, zooming in on specific aspects of the festival theme. The “Study Circles” consist of working groups in which participants come together before, during, and after the festival and generate various outputs such as workshops, events, and publications.

For more information: https://transmediale.de/festival-2019

Confirmed Viral Events for 2012/13

  • There are a number of confirmed events related to Virality that might be of interest to readers of this blog.

    Following the academic launch of Virality at Goldsmiths College in October and the launch party with Mute Magazine in Limehouse last Friday (more on that collaboration soon in another post), I will be joining Jussi Parikka at the School of Arts and Humanities (Culture, Media and Creative Industries) Kings College, London on the 20th March (this new date is penciled in replacing the Feb 6th) for our “Anomalies, Archaeology and Contagion” talk and discussion followed by a wine reception for both Virality and Jussi’s What is Media Archaeology?

    There’s an interesting event at the University of East London (School of Arts and Digital Industries) in Feb where I’m planning to do a piece on “Viral Love and the Underground Man.” The “Love Slam” event is on the 14th Feb 6-9pm.

    As part of an ongoing series of collaborations with artists and musicians I’ve been working with the “crowd” artist Dean Todd on a performance piece for Virality which will be exhibited at the “Bookworks” show between April 8-19th, also at the University of East London.

    On April 11th 2013 I will visit the Copenhagen Business School to do a talk called “Putting the Neuron Doctrine to Work.” This is for an invite to a public lecture series called “Public Sphere, Crowd Sentiments and the Brain.”

    I have a provisional working title for a confirmed invite to the Department of Sociology and Communications at Brunel University on May 24th. “Too Much Connectivity” will form part of the “New Media and the Internet: Digital Democracy or Complex Chaos?” series of workshops.

    Between July 1-3rd we (Darren Ellis, John Cromby, Lewis Goodings, Tony Sampson, and Ian Tuckerare) are off to the Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands to run a couple of seminars called “Leaking Affects and Mediated Spaces.”

    Finally, there are a few other events in the pipeline including a contribution to an exhibit at the Berlin Transmediale Festival in Jan-Feb 2013, and a series of workshops at the University of Bern in Switzerland on the subject of the Immunologic. More details to follow.