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 explores 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.

RESPONSE:ABILITY is also a call to action - to seize and transform the moment of our own individual liveness within the cacophony of communications density. The resultant convergence of media, interfaces and accelerated data flows being increasingly merged into mega-infrastructures with little oversight risks turning the greatest republic on earth - the internet - into an empire of control and freedoms lost. The abilities required to respond, to enact and steer collaborative energies become the new means to co-opt the tools and systems of our live culture - and use these to create new forms of societal interaction, communication and mobility. How do such systems act to enable new forms of liveness, entrench the assertiveness of individual thought and expression, and ultimately move toward the forms of open structures and flows that visionaries such as Marshall McLuhan and later the pioneers of the early internet envisaged? In an equally open competition for resources, attention and sensory stimulation the ability to fuse the desire for digital emancipation with the necessity to act is our task.

The net we operate in is itself a living entity, built by others. Now it is up to the power of our response:ability to put it to use!