Affect Space refers to self-mediated leisure spaces that act as affective backdrops for digital self-enactment.
Hybrid Space Lab presents Deep Space.
Lecture & Discussion Deep Space @ transmediale Festival, HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 4 February 2018
An annual festival and a platform for critical reflection on cultural transformation from a post-digital perspective. For over thirty years, one of the leading international events in the field of digital art and culture.
The annual festival brings together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide.
Since 2021 and for the first time in the festival’s history, transmediale runs its studio space at silent green Kulturquartier hosting different event formats and activities throughout the year.
Lecture and discussion by Prof. Elizabeth Sikiaridi & Prof. Frans Vogelaar, Hybrid Space Lab
The Affect Space program links masterclasses and events in Berlin, Madrid, Rotterdam, and The Hague this round lecture and discussion discusses the context and results of the first masterclass in the series.
Deep Space is a long-term investigative program initiated to deal with politics of memory, controversial space and monuments, digitalization and heritage.
Deep Space: re-signifying Valle de los Caídos aims at developing creative processes, concepts, and ideas that can break through and transform the symbolic power of the place.
Valle de los Caídos is one of the world’s most controversial monuments.
The structure was built between 1940 and 1959 partly by the forced labor of Spanish republican political prisoners.
Next to the remains of over 33.000 fallen from both sides of the conflict (that were moved there from mass graves spread all over the country), the basilica features Franco’s grave in its most prominent spot – and next to it the grave of the Falangist leader Antonio Primo de Rivera.
Workshop „Deep Space: Re-signifying Valle de los Caídos“ @ Medialab Prado & Valle de los Caídos, Madrid, 25.–27. Oktober 2018
Eröffnung, Ausstellung, Vortrag & Diskussion „Lost Memory – Recovered Memory“ @ Goethe-Institut & Fundación Pablo Iglesias, Madrid, 5. Juni 2019
Workshop & Vortrag im Rahmen des ISEA 2022-Symposiums „Possibilities: Heritage and Futures“, Barcelona, 12. und 14. Juni 2022
Face
Value
“Things are what they are—but could they be different? transmediale 2018 face value aims to take stock of current affairs, to recognize things for what they are before saying how they could be different. It is an attempt to probe the values, as well as the processes of value creation, that have contributed to our present moment of extreme political, economic, and cultural divides. The festival seeks possible new ways of resisting and deconstructing the alarming development of a digital populism, the radicalization of net culture and the new culture wars.
“Taking things at face value” seems to have become the norm of public discourse amidst today’s reactionary and algorithmically guided communication practices. transmediale wants to challenge this impulse to judge things by their immediate appearance and instead look at less visible issues, which run deep across all sectors of society. These include power relations rarely discussed at digital culture events, such as contemporary imbalances of class, gender, and race, which are also being built into technological systems. In fact, rather than providing an emancipatory alternative, (post-)digital culture today seems to support hate-mongering, racist and neo-colonial powers. This, however, should not be a reason to lament a mythical past, back in which, supposedly, the internet was free and digital creativity unbound. Rather, there is a need to embrace both unsettling and uniting cultural practices, as well as daring speculative thinking, to promote auto-criticality and an awareness that nothing is ever as simple as its surface suggests. Similarly, cultural events like transmediale are made up of different political imaginaries and communities that are simultaneously resistant and complicit to the developments one so urgently needs to oppose. With these challenges and paradoxes of the present moment in mind, how can artists, cultural workers, and speculative theorists respond to the current politics of taking things at face value and, at the same time, face their own values? How does one name biases and exploitative mechanisms for what they are, in order to formulate new ways to resist, deconstruct or move beyond them?”
transmediale Festival 2018 Face Value
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