transmediale announces the program of the 2025 edition (near) near but — far, which will take place from 29 January to 2 February 2025 at various venues in Berlin, including silent green and HKW. In January, transmediale will also present the group exhibition UnNatural Encounters in cooperation with EMAP and silent green. Exploring the question of how everyday interactions with digital platforms shape our human need for connection, transmediale presents a three-day program in various formats, including talks, lectures, performances, installations and screenings at HKW, the festival’s long-standing venue. In cooperation with partner festival CTM, two performance evenings will be jointly organized.
Image above: Tati Au Miel, Foto von Brandon Bowen.
transmediale 2025 follows a renewed curatorial approach that shapes both the theme and the festival’s programming and methodology. Two curators, Ben Evans James and Elise Misao Hunchuck, will develop the thematic focus of the festival edition and lead the curatorial research. In addition, they have invited a group of program contributors to contribute to the festival: artist and performer Nina Davies, editor-researcher Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung and trans*disciplinary artist-designer Ren Loren Britton.
transmediale is also expanding its collaboration with long-standing partners: Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton, Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) at Aarhus University, Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Media Studies (EMW) at the University and FH Potsdam.
Topic
Algorithms (re)shape our human need for connection by driving deceptive forms of proximity as a substitute for actual closeness. Digital platforms and systems thus provide us with a certain form of communication that is accompanied by a performance of proximity: they are based on a choreographed algo-rhythm that affects our policies, our work and our relationships with each other through the smooth user interfaces of our devices.
From ASMR trash talk whisperers on TikTok, to children talking to their parents as if they were Alexa, to e-girls selling their bathwater, or people cosplaying robots and serving drinks at a Tesla event – (near) near but – far develops an understanding of the questionable relationship between this strange, virtually generated proximity and the new forms of familiarity that are proposed to us through automated transactions. The festival goes beyond the mere juxtaposition of the concepts of proximity and closeness and approaches the core question of the topic through a series of affects: How can technologies support relationships that can respond more appropriately to the complexities of our individual and collective displeasure?
Festival weekend at HKW
January 31 – February 02, 2025
The festival unfolds over the weekend by destabilizing the relationship between proximity and familiarity in a series of talks, performances and unmoderated conversations – a format that departs from the formality of familiar panel discussions or moderated Q&A sessions. While the talks reveal how algorithms shape and reshape our human need for connection, the conversations expand on these themes and help us develop a collective understanding of the effects of familiarity – ambiguity, ambivalence, opacity, hesitation and translation – that we lose to algorithms and their machine-driven actions.
The discourse program asks how distance is partly used as a tool to reduce us in our complexity and limit us to an ideal idea of ourselves. Together we explore the trend of using large AI language models to represent human perspectives through machine proxies. And we ask: What happens when we are confronted with what makes us most human? How to negotiate agency and representation when people, such as aid or asylum seekers, find themselves in the impossible position of having to prove their own humanity? Other aspects of this year’s festival include trans*crip technologies that expand our definitions of technology to include marginalized and intersectional perspectives, or skills needed to document police violence at protests with image and video analysis.
With contributions from Olga Goriunova, Laura Kurgan, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Federico Campagna, Shaka McGlotten, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Mercedes Bunz, DeForrest Brown Jr, Cait McKinney, Alex Martinis Roe, Lindsey A. Freeman, David Isaac Hecht, Anna Engelhardt, Thomas Keenan and Ren Loren Britton.
Installations
Artists whose works materialize the destabilization of proximity and familiarity perform in the public spaces of HKW. The installations are periodically activated through performances, presentations, talks and screenings.
Influenced by the difficulty autonomous vehicles have in recognizing flashing lights from emergency vehicles, Felicity Hammond’s Dark Adaptation explores the limits of what autonomous vehicles can “see”. Set in a crash test center of the future, Hammond’s work shows an evolutionary regression of the autonomous vehicle: one in which sensors are manipulated to collide with the carnal rhythms of data emerging from the human body.
Since May 2024, North Korea has sent thousands of balloons with packages full of waste – including Hello Kitty merchandise, electronic waste, cigarette butts and soil with traces of human feces – across the border to the Republic of Korea. While politicians in Seoul call the balloons a declaration of war, Hana Yoo’s installation uses the playful form of the primary object, the balloon, to explore the ambiguity of the medium and its message. Yoo’s installation will be activated by short lecture-performances that will open and close the festival weekend.
Performances
A reading-stretching-running club will move through Berlin, drawing a line from the McLuhan lecture to the closing hours of the weekend. Led by Lindsey A. Freeman, the transmediale running club will create space to feel your body and experience the city through acts of love, queerness and running.
With her solo performance DEAD DAD DEATH CULT, Samra Mayanja presents the tension between involuntary forms of institutional confinement (like prisons) and our voluntary desire to place ourselves in institutions that welcome us (like a university). Based on Mayanja’s experience as a call center worker for the National Health Service in the UK, the performance explores the continual application of empathy in a (dis)localized position at the end of a helpline.
UNTITLED (iii) is a performance by Bhenji Ra, Tati au Miel and SUUTOO that explores trickery as a resistant practice and a catalyst for embodied emancipation. Through ritualized myth-making based on the artists’ shared cultural connections to spirits and folklore, they play with themes of visibility, shadow and voyeurism, leading the audience into states of altered realities and darkness.
Performer Nina Davies and artist duo 2girls1comp collaborate in a new performance inspired by the proliferation of NPC dance trends on TikTok and bringing these trends back to the game world of GTA V. 2girls1comp is a duo founded in 2023 by Marco De Mutiis and Alexandra Pfammatter. Their work changes the logic of video games as an act of creative counter-play, revealing the social and economic fabric in which we find ourselves.
Film program
Each of the curated film programs is dedicated to a single theme, which is illuminated by the works of short films by various artists. One program alienates us from the concept of distance and the common notions that view it as a form of distance or retreat. Instead, the films in this program encourage us to understand distance as the space between different perspectives that we traverse in order to learn from each other and achieve a new quality of intimacy. Another series of films questions how the intimacies of human movement in dance have been commercialized through digital platforms. The films explore how the technology of the moving body can hack, bend and deny algorithmic control mechanisms.
In addition to the curated film programs, a series of live film events will take place in which filmmakers will be involved on site through lectures, talks and performances. These include a lecture performance by Lého Galibert-Laîné, as well as talks with 2girls1comp, Alice Lenay and Maud Craigie. Basir Mahmood will talk about his film moon-sighting. The film explores how the connections within Mirpuri communities in Pakistan and the UK can be unraveled through processes of othering, where what is considered Mirpuri in the UK is defined as British in Mirpur.
Filipina-Australian filmmaker Bhenji Ra will screen her film Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon and talk about her ongoing work exploring methods of performance that decenter hegemonic Western dance conventions and critically engage with gender and sexual difference. In a conversation with Tati au Miel and Susan Gibb, Ra will explore how the surface of film might represent the histories erased by colonization. This will be used to discuss how to develop a movement language that connects gender vocabularies with colonial realities of the past and present in the Asia-Pacific region.
Featuring works by 2girls1comp, Alex Martinis Roe, Aaron Ratajczak, Basir Mahmood, Bhenji Ra, Johannes Binotto, Charlotte Zhang, 업체eobchae, Hana Yoo, Lého Galibert-Laîné, Maud Craigie, Nina Davies, Simon Ripoll-Hurier, among others.
transmediale x CTM Abendprogramm
The sister festivals transmediale and CTM present a joint program with two performance evenings at HKW’s Miriam Makeba Auditorium. Using the latest developments in generative AI, audiovisual storytelling and data sonification, the works explore a conflicted past, present and future. They offer personal, critical and speculative reflections on how AI enables new approaches and intimacies to our stories, to the world around us and to each other. The program on Friday and Saturday evening features audiovisual performances by Portrait XO, Rick Farin & Actual Objects, Hulubalang feat. Brandon Tay, among others.
Prologue in silent green
January 29 – 30, 2025
Conceived as a prologue to the festival weekend, two days of workshops will take place beforehand, including open source research on topics such as designing somatic experiences, monitoring protest actions remotely and understanding how images become evidence. This part of the program requires separate registration. An interactive installation by Ali Akbar Mehta can be seen in the transmediale studio. Purgatory EDIT is an installation and cyber performance based on a media archive compiled by artists with over 40,000 entries representing forms of violence, conflict and trauma.
With workshops by Ren Loren Britton, Anna Engelhardt and Marc Cinkevich, Hazel Meyer, eeefff, BARD Berlin and Amnesty International, DeForrest Brown Jr, David Isaac Hecht and the annual PhD Research Workshop.
At the end of the two-day prologue, the opening of transmediale will take place on Thursday evening, January 30, 2025, in the concrete hall of silent green. As every year, this event will provide an opportunity for encounters, exchanges and celebrations with the festival community and the Berlin public. The program will present highlights such as performances by DeForrest Brown Jr, Tati au Miel and other artists.
About transmediale
After four extraordinary years, Nóra O’ Murchú’s term as artistic director came to an end this summer. For the upcoming 2025 edition, Ben Evans James and Elise Misao Hunchuck will take over the thematic direction and curation of the festival. Both curators bring valuable experience from their previous collaboration with transmediale as well as a close familiarity with the festival and its team. The transmediale advisory board brings together long-time companions and new allies from the transdisciplinary fields of art and digital culture. Current members include Nora Al-Badri, Asia Bazdyrieva, Gabriele Horn and Jussi Parikka. Working closely with the new advisory board, the transmediale team, led by Managing Director Filippo Gianetta, is developing a sustainable model for a constantly evolving and transforming festival. This moment of change is being used as an opportunity to rethink the functionality, requirements and goals of a cultural organization and its management models.
WHEN?
Wednesday, January 29 – Sunday, February 02, 2025.
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