Transmediale

Berlin, 31 January – 4 February 2017

Under the title of face value, transmediale 2018 is probing the values, as well as the processes of value creation, that have contributed to our present moment of extreme political, economic, and cultural divides. The festival is taking place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt from 31 January to 4 February 2018.

transmediale has been funded as a cultural institution of excellence by Kulturstiftung des Bundes as of 2004.

The 31st edition of the festival, directed by Kristoffer Gansing for the seventh time, aims to take stock of current affairs in order to understand if and how things could be different. Its participants will seek possible new ways of resisting and deconstructing the alarming development of digital populism, the radicalization of net culture, and the new culture wars.

“Taking things at face value” seems to have become the norm of public discourse amidst today’s reactionary and algorithmically guided communication practices. transmediale wants to challenge this impulse to judge things by their immediate appearance and instead look at less visible issues, which run deep across all sectors of society.

(Post)digital culture today seems to support hate-mongering, racist and neo-colonial powers rather than provide an emancipatory alternative. transmediale is therefore actively seeking out self-critical discussions of topics otherwise rarely addressed at digital culture events—such as contemporary imbalances of class, gender and race—within a variety of curatorial formats and modes of knowledge exchange.

How can artists, cultural workers, and speculative theorists respond to the current politics of taking things at face value and, at the same time, face their own values?