.. going Berlin ???

some points for those coming or being in town the next days ….

BASICS – starting from tomorrow transmediale 05 interrogates:
what are the BASICS of your culture? is your reality digital or analogue? are you ethical or aesthetical?

transmediale is the biggest and most significant festival for art and the creative usage of digital media in Germany. Once a year the festival presents new and outstanding projects in the field of digital culture and provides reflexions on the role of digital technologies in contemporary society. It is a forum of communication for artists, media workers and a broad public interested in arts of vital and still increasing international importance.

… globalisation is making societies hyper-potential, open, fractured – what is fundamental, what’s essential, what’s vital?

Our experiential world is widely determined by technologies: Internet and mobile phones transform social relations; robotics revolutionises industrial production, while biotechnology affords a new relationship towards nature and body. Although technical products promise enhanced agency and security, we experience an increased disorientation: the ethical question of what one should do and take responsibility for, is eclipsed by an immense number of options.

Technologies open up fields of agency and provide interfaces for designing these personal and communal realities, – always also implying mechanisms of exclusion. However, in order to appropriate the creative potentials, it is necessary to know about the ethical and aesthetical effects of the technologies applied, as well as their limitations.

transmediale.05 explores the BASICS of artistic practice with digital technologies. The festival investigates the aesthetical and ethical foundations of a frantic and hyper-potential culture, and presents models of an artistic practice whose ethics derive not from past value systems, but from an appropriation of an extreme and contradictory, contemporary culture.

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.. those who want to take a look at a controversial point in german history can visit regarding terror: the RAF-exhibition (description plus short review) during their stay in the city. The exhibition provides some documentary material, but otherwise deals mostly with the image of terror established through the ‘imagining of terror’ at this very specific time, which might be very hard to get an understanding for today. I would suggest that a look at films like ‘Die Bleierne Zeit‘ and ‘Deutschland im Herbst‘ might give a slight impression of that period.
Thus to have at almost the same time the discussion about the still ongoing Flick collection at Hamburger Bahnhof occuring throughout the town might still hint to what Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith states at the end of her article on Deutschland im Herbst:

They remind the audience that history is a way of discussing and describing past events. These directors had to face their history in order to make this film. Above all, they make the audience understand that a country cannot hide its past….

.. so in a sense some lines of the specific historical situation are crossing each other again and thus contribute to mark interrelated moments ….

>> mind the __ GAP* ?

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