Transmediale

transmediale is an annual festival for media art and digital culture taking place for one week in February in Berlin, Germany. The festival engages in reflective, aesthetic and speculative positions in between art, technology and culture. It seeks to express a critical understanding of technology as being more than the digital world as well as of the cultural as being more than what emerges from within institutionalised fields of production. Accordingly, transmediale is a transdisciplinary platform, always searching for new avenues of artistic, academic, activist and everyday expressions. It is a project always on the look out for projects and persons who may help to navigate, reflect on and ultimately re-model the production of contemporary culture.

Within the scope of its annual festival, transmediale includes exhibitions, conferences, film and video programmes, live performances and publications. It also contributes to long- and short-term collaboration projects unfolding throughout the year. Moreover, club transmediale (since 2011 called CTM) takes place in parallel and in cooperation dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music.

The 29th edition of transmediale takes place from 2 to 7 February 2016 at House of World Cultures in Berlin.

transmediale was founded in 1988 as VideoFilmFest, a side-project of the Berlin Berlinale’s International Forum of New Cinema with the intention to offer a platform to electronic media productions not accepted at traditional film festivals such as the Berlinale.

Within the following 20 years, the festival steadily evolved: in 1997 it was first renamed transmedia before it was named transmediale in 1998. This change reflected the festival’s expanding programme which now embraced a wide spectrum of multimedia-based art forms. In 2001, transmediale was restructured. The relocation of the festival to the House of World Cultures and a further expanded programme lead to increasing numbers of visitors to the festival. At transmediale.02, for the first time, an extensive exhibition was presented to the audience, allowing attendees to experience media art spatially. In 2006, the subtitle of the festival changed from international media art festival to festival for art and digital culture, opening up the festival to not just pure media art but also to projects where art, technology and the digital age meet the everyday. The opening of the festival is further reflected in the extension of the transmediale Award with the Vilém Flusser Theory Award, as a reaction to a growing number of theoretical and critical works submitted for the competition. In 2008, the 'transmediale parcours' publication series was launched in order to reflect upon research, as well as artistic and critical backgrounds behind each festival’s theme. The transmediale Vilém Flusser Theory Award recognized outstanding research based art works as well as those dealing with media theory between 2008 and 2011. For the 2012 festival the Theory Award was transformed into a Residency Programme for artistic research. Moreover, there was no transmediale Award and also no Open Web Award any longer. Instead, the festival is now opting for tight curatorial coherence in the programming as well as more community engagement outside of the festival.

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