program and highlights
transmediale 2013 reveals BWPWAP program and participants:
Alejandro Jodorowsky, Elizabeth Price, Ian Hacking, Sonia Sheridan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Geert Lovink, and more
transmediale is pleased to announce our 2013 festival program and rich roster of participants.
Traversing thematic threads, professions, panels, exhibitions, film screenings, performances, and workshops; the one Pluto long day and Earth week from Jan 29th to Feb 3rd, 2013 will present visitors with one of the most diverse events on Berlin's cultural calendar, under the transmediale 2013 BWPWAP Back When Pluto Was A Planet theme.
Participant highlights include:
Alejandro Jodorowsky (cl), Elizabeth Price (uk), Ian Hacking (ca), Lorraine Daston (us), Michael E. Brown (us), Sonia Landy Sheridan (us), Kenneth Goldsmith (us), Olga Goriunova (ru), Geert Lovink (nl), Eija-Liisa Ahtila (fi), Dennis Adams (us), John Smith (uk), Sandy Stone (us), Diane Torr (uk/ca), People Like Us (uk), Boris Hegenbart (de), Felix Kubin (de), Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez (br), A Guy Called Gerald (uk), Demdike Stare (uk), Gatekeeper (us) and more...
transmediale is also pleased to announce a series of world premieres including:
Alejandro Jodorowsky evening w/ L'Incal Moebius series followed by double-bill music performance with Demdike Stare & Gatekeeper
Award winning film The Woolworths Choir of 1979 will be presented by Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price
Cross-gender performance by artist Diane Torr w/ Anus B. Haven, Anaïs Héraud, Kai Simon Stoeger, and Viola
Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez Coded Narratives performance w/ guest musician A Guy Called Gerald
World premiere of Consequences (One Thing Leads to Another) by People Like Us
Sonia Landy Sheridan's first European solo exhibition Imaging with Machine Processes
On the opening night of Jan 29th, at Berlin’s center for international cultural exchanges, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the reclassification of Pluto will be introduced as the background story to the festival theme. Astronomer Michael E. Brown (us) otherwise known as “The Man Who Killed Pluto”, with planetary scientist Gerhard Schwehm (de) and researcher Lisa R. Messeri (us) will unite guests to participate in a rare planetary revote, and to discuss Pluto's classification shift to dwarf planet.
The demotion of Pluto throughout the festival will be used as a metaphor for our cultural situation, where technological and scientific discoveries quickly alter and challenge knowledge paradigms, opening up new opportunities and cultural scenarios.
transmediale programs will follow, initiating the week long possibility to interact with four thematic threads: Users, Networks, Paper, and Desire, all shifting in their cultural role. Visitors will be able to follow a thread's events throughout the week, learning about their historical and potential qualities, or branch off and find overlapping relationships in different threads' programs.
Art installations will be incorporated into the festival environment in the form of an expansive and multi-functional social network parody sculpture called Octo.
Three exhibitions about reimagining the effects, uses, and development of contemporary media will be called The Miseducation of Anya Major.
Octo, the Official Miscommunication Platform of transmediale 2013, supported by the German international cooperation agency GIZ, and the collaborative production of Telekommunisten and raumlaborberlin, mimics the Rohrpost pneumatic tube mail system and engages visitors to perform Mail Art works delivered through the system in capsules. Serving as ironic commentary on social networking, the retro-futuristic project examines the social and political effects of network communication. In imagining interferences within the structure, collaborators seek to explore the critical and artistic potential created by blindspots. Watchful moderators will document users' private experiences, while some will contribute to the cessation of operations in general, becoming the “bugs” in the system. Furthermore, panels such as Disrupting the Bureaucracy: Rethinking Social Networks, and Mail Art in the GDR will discuss the experiences of those involved in the projects.
Taking its cue from the famous television commercial for the first Macintosh computer,
The Miseducation of Anya Major includes three projects that investigate questions of knowledge, learning, and education in relation to contemporary media.
The first two are the Tools of Distorted Creativity group show with Cornelia Sollfrank (de), Kim Asendorf (de) and Daniel García Andújar (es) and an artistic response to the recently published ‘Evil Media’ book by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey in the form of Evil Media Distribution Centre by YoHa (uk).
The third project and solo show Imaging with Machine Processes: The Generative Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan, exhibits works by generative iconic artist Sonia Landy Sheridan who assembled the Generative Systems class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and launched a dynamic platform for students to explore and experiment with emerging technologies, while challenging educational structures in order to reinvent them.
All three projects seek to challenge the homogenization of media education enforced by creative industries, and the accompanying definition of a "skillful" media user.
In collaboration with The Embassy of Canada, transmediale will present the Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2013: Plutos, Plutocrats, & Plutonium with the renowned Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking and historian of science respondent Lorraine Daston, discussing the importance of classification and naming, to our ways of inhabiting the world.
Please refer to our full program overview for time & date specificity, and our complete participant list. More general, thematic information, along with the transmediale press releases and press kit are available online.
Press Accreditation applications are accepted online until January 15th, 2013.
transmediale is funded as a cultural institution of excellence by the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes).