Held every year in Berlin, the festival Transmediale can be loosely described as a rallying point for artists, academics, and designers with an interest in the creative and speculative potential of digital culture. The formats are both discursive and aesthetic, but with a definite emphasis on the former in the form of lectures and panel discussions. Although every year has an overarching theme – this year’s being “scale” – my experience has been, now and on occasions when I have visited the festival previously, that thematic specificity is of lesser relevance. This is because the basic premise of Transmediale is that digital infrastructures and their media – from big data to imaging technologies – shape and form the entire spectre of cultural practices, from social life to politics. Delving into the digital on a structural and technical level is, at least in this context, seen as crucial if one wants to understand or critique anything at all.
This year, as part of the decentralised Transmediale exhibition Out of Scale, on display until 26 February, you can visit selected Spätis (Berlin’s more or less 24-hour convenience stores) and buy a USB drive containing works by, among others, VNS Matrix, Lorna Mills, and Patricia Domínguez & Suzanne Treister. But what, if anything, does such a physical detour add to the art experience, apart from a nostalgic reminder of outdated forms of distribution, when the same works can be experienced in Transmediale’s “warehouse” at the silent green Kulturquartier in Wedding?
The cramped installation in the physical exhibition, where almost all the works are placed on steel shelves, was described at the press conference as inspired by the city’s many app-controlled mini-warehouses, a by-product of the constant gentrification of new city districts. To me, the compressed format appeared to be a product of necessity, linked to the fact that the festival’s main venue this year is the Akademi der Künste in Hanseatenweg, where large parts of the exhibition space are currently dedicated to an exhibition with Nan Goldin. In the past, meaning before the pandemic, Transmediale took place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a significantly larger building which often happily hosted an extensive group exhibition as well as the rest of the festival programme under one roof.
The American architect and composer Robert Gerard Pietrusko’s lecture on Thursday morning was about satellite images in false colours, a technology developed by the US military and NASA and used, among other things, to estimate the Soviet Union’s capacity for food production. It was an aesthetically pleasing presentation thanks to the satellite images and the many neat diagrams set to Pietrusko’s self-penned ambient music. The lecture was one of several items on the programme that examined how image technologies are used for data collection, thereby also exploring their role in interpreting and giving shape to the world.
The fact that the development of media technologies is often closely linked to military intelligence and surveillance was also emphasised by artist and filmmaker Alaa Mansour. In her presentation, which formed part of a panel earlier that day, she showed examples of how photography had been used in the past by European colonial powers to portray certain groups as dangerous, thereby justifying their own use of violence. This continues today, albeit in more sophisticated forms, such as the US entertainment industry’s depictions of the “war on terror.”
This year, as ever, Transmediale focused a great deal of attention on the surveillance that we in the West are exposed to more or less voluntarily through our smart devices, their software, and various digital services such as social media. As such, it seemed appropriate that the non-consensual and often violent surveillance that Western nation states continue to carry out in other parts of the world was also given significant attention.
War scholar Anthony Downey, who sat on the same panel as Mansour, talked about how artificial intelligence is used to predict who could commit a terrorist attack, by, for instance, monitoring individuals’ movement patterns with drones. When these systems arrive at incorrect conclusions, such as when aid worker Zemari Ahmadi and nine family members were killed by a Hellfire missile in Kabul in 2021, the error is often attributed to the human overseeing the data. But the problem, beyond the ethically questionable aspects of using preventive attacks, is also, according to Downey, that such systems give human operators limited insight into why and how they reach specific conclusions. These AI-models are so complex and classified that it is difficult to understand how the data is turned into ‘evidence’ of sinister intent.
Several contributions addressed the everyday surveillance carried out by Big Tech companies through consumer products in more prosperous countries. Graeme Arnfield’s essay film Home Invasion (2023) tells the story of the Amazon-owned smart doorbell Ring, which enables the user to see who’s at the door through a camera and to record footage. The film consists of text superimposed on video footage captured by that very product, found on the web. Clips vary from sweet and comical to violent and disturbing, while the text highlights research which implies that such products make people feel uneasy, afraid of everyday events near the home that we would otherwise would be completely unaware of.
The use of data collection and analysis for activist purposes was the subject of a very interesting panel featuring, among others, Francesco Sebregondi from the French open-source investigative organisation Index. The group analyses the course of events in cases where state agencies such as the police have exercised violence. Drawing on material from open sources such as mobile phone videos, the group reconstructs the course of events in a 3D model. In doing so, it shines a spotlight on the extent of state violence in France and on the authorities’ refusal to acknowledge their accountability. As Stefanos Levidis of Index’s better-known sister organisation Forensic Architecture noted in the conversation section of the panel, the decision to use violence is often called a spur-of-the-moment move by police testifying in the courtroom. At the same time, he continued, such incidents are not, in fact, of the moment, as these decisions themselves are often the result of long-standing structural patterns, such as racism.
More light-hearted – and cheerful – was the conversation between artist Bahar Noorizadeh and theorist McKenzie Wark on Saturday morning, based on their shared interest in club culture. Wark, who will soon release a book on raving, pointed out that on a phenomenological level, the rave is one of the few routines that get her attention away from her phone for a few hours, as participation requires presence and there is often a ban on photos or phones. It is a rare opportunity to indulge in collective bliss and temporarily forget one’s status as a subject. Wark also talked about how queer club culture is an arena where trans people, such as herself, are perfectly commonplace and are not showered with either positive or negative attention for no other reason than their being present.
With the latter conversation in mind, it seemed fitting that Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet headlined Transmediale and sister festival CTM’s closing concert on Saturday evening with the visually and sonically overloaded concert work Strobe.rip. As the title might suggest, strobe lights scoured the room from the smoke-covered stage, while distorted vocals oscillated between growling and melodic autotune set to gabber-inspired beats. On screens above and to the side of the stage played a cavalcade of disturbing AI-generated clowns in hideous colours as well as distorted Tom & Jerry animations, the latter carefully synchronised with the music. The whole show was just the right kind of demented. After spending the greater part of several days taking in long lectures, it was good to be reminded that the artistic and creative potential of digital culture doesn’t only lie in explicitly critical approaches, but also in its aesthetically immersive and visually generative potential.
