The transmediale and CTM Festivals have once again co-curated this year’s program of audiovisual and audio performances at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Performances by Demdike Stare, Gatekeeper, People Like Us, Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez featuring A Guy Called Gerald, as well as Boris Hegenbart with Felix Kubin unite the ideas behind both festival themes. 

The synchronicity of different temporalities, the the increasing blurriness of terms such as near and far, natural and synthetic, and the paradox of simultaneous excess and scarcity are all seen as effects of a dissolution of boundaries fomented by the digitalization of cultural artefacts and their production. The homey comfort of obsolete technologies and archives stands beside the brutally illuminated, overstimulating aesthetic of global digital capitalism. Reversals, devaluations, and re-evaluations are to be found everywhere. Dystopia transforms into utopia, the past into the present, wealth into want, and back again.Working with the abundance of existing approaches feeds idiosyncratic re-invention and, at the same time, opposes the concept of original creativity. And wherever the omnipotent flow of communication can be taken for granted, new (or old?) possibilities of community open up by limiting or even interrupting these connections. BWPWAP identifies the ongoing revision of established categories of knowledge as a source of continuous upheaval, a process that equally feeds the blissfull diversification and mercilessly cumulative excesses of the Golden Age. The revisited will never be completely forgotten, but rather retroactively induces a plethora of alternate narratives.

Read more about the programme and theme of transmediale on the festival's website › transmediale.de.