transmediale 2018 face value

About

The 31st edition of the festival, directed by Kristoffer Gansing for the seventh time, aims to take stock of current affairs in order to understand if and how things could be different.

Its participants will seek possible new ways of resisting and deconstructing the alarming development of 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.

(Post)digital culture today seems to support hate-mongering, racist and neo-colonial powers rather than provide an emancipatory alternative. transmediale is therefore actively seeking out self-critical discussions of topics otherwise rarely addressed at digital culture events—such as contemporary imbalances of class, gender and race—within a variety of curatorial formats and modes of knowledge exchange. 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?
With among others: Rosa Barba, Jonathan Beller, Zach Blas, CAMP, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, James Ferraro, Zachary Formwalt, Lisa Nakamura, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Roee Rosen, Nick Thurston und Françoise Vergès

Curated by Daphne Dragona (conference program), Inga Seidler (exhibition program), Florian Wüst (film and video program)