Published to celebrates the 30-year anniversary of transmediale, this reader aims to use the critical and artistic knowledge gained at the festival over the years to reframe the question of the role of media today. In a world where technology increasingly operates independently of humans, where does the power to act and mediate lie?
This collection of art and theory analyzes today's post-digital conditions for critical media practices—across and beyond the analog and the digital, the human and the nonhuman. The contributions also look across and beyond the field of media art, staking out new paths for understanding and working in the transversal territories between theory, technology, and art.
The concept of the post-digital is a way to critically take account of, contextualize, and shift the coordinates of new technologies as part of contemporary culture. The post-digital condition is not merely a theoretical issue but also a situation that affects conceptual and practice-based work.
The program of the transmediale festival in Berlin, celebrating its thirtieth year in 2017, has reflected these changes, and this book gathers new contributions from leading international theorists and artists of media and art who have taken part in the festival program over its past five editions. Divided into the thematic sections “Imaginaries,” “Interventions,” and “Ecologies,” this book is not a document of the festival itself, it is rather a stand-alone exploration of the ongoing themes of transmediale in a book format.
The reader is developed as a collaboration between transmediale and Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
Contributions by Moreshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke, Jamie Allen & David Gauthier, Clemens Apprich & Ned Rossiter, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Benjamin H. Bratton, Florian Cramer, Dieter Daniels, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Daphne Dragona, Keller Easterling, Olga Goriunova, Louis Henderson, Geraldine Juarez, Olia Lialina, Alessandro Ludovico, Rosa Menkman, Julian Oliver & Danja Vasiliev, Erica Scourti, Cornelia Sollfrank, Telekommunisten (Baruch Gottlieb & Dmytri Kleiner), Tiziana Terranova, YoHa (Graham Harwood & Matsuko Yokokoji).
Published on the occasion of “Ever elusive” – 30th edition of transmediale – Festival for art and digital culture, Berlin, from February 2 to March 5, 2017.
