Transmediale
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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transmediale is an annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, usually held over five days at the end of January and the beginning of February. The 2017 edition marked its 30-year anniversary.
A conference, varying exhibition formats, a film and video program, performances, and workshops build its programmatic core. Simultaneously and in cooperation with transmediale, CTM Festival (formerly club transmediale, renamed in 2011) offers an annual platform for experimental and electronic music. Once a side event of transmediale, it is now organized and curated independently. Throughout the year, transmediale is also involved in a number of long- and short-term cooperative projects via transmediale/resource.
History
transmediale was founded in 1988 under the name of VideoFilmFest (VideoFest as of 1989) within the framework of Berlinale, as a side event of the Internationales Forum des Jungen Films section. Its founders, Hartmut Horst and video artist and activist Micky Kwella, sought to create a platform for electronic media productions, which were excluded from classic film festivals such as Berlinale. Over the course of the following 30 years, the festival evolved steadily and independently of Berlinale: from its initial focus on video culture it turned to cultivating an artistic and critical dialogue with television and multimedia, eventually emerging as a leading international platform for media art. In 1997, its name was changed to transmedia, and finally to transmediale in 1998. The change reflected the programmatic extension of the festival, which by then encompassed a broad spectrum of multimedia art forms such as Internet and Software Art.
In 2001, transmediale underwent far-reaching structural changes; further additions to the program and a new venue, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, led to a continuous increase in attendance. transmediale.02 was the first edition to feature an extensive exhibition in which media art could be experienced in a sensuous and physical way. In 2006, the festival's subheading changed from “international media art festival” to “festival for art and digital culture”—a decision reflective of a shift towards a more open approach that would include art, technology, and everyday life in an increasingly digitalized world instead of the previous, narrower focus on media art alone.
The transmediale Award was introduced in 2001 to honour visionary works and projects centering around technology-led societies. In order to do justice to the rising number of submissions of theoretical works, the competition was complemented by the Vilém Flusser Theory Award at transmediale.08. Named after philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser, it promoted “outstanding, media-theoretical and research-based artworks” until 2011. In 2012, it was converted into a residency program for artistic research; the transmediale Award and Open Web Award were discontinued. Kristoffer Gansing, the festival's artistic director between 2012 and 2020, recounted his ambitions for the festival in an interview in Ocula Magazine with Terence Sharpe: 'When I first came on board [...] my idea was to bring a curatorial coherency to what I saw as a festival dissipating into a kind of 'creative crowd' without much focus, so I brought in more exhibitions.'
