SOURCE : MAZINE
Submitted by Armin Medosch on Tue, 2006-02-07 16:11. Transmediale

Subjective notes about Transmediale 2006

The festival Transmediale is one of the oldest and biggest of its kind in Europe. Held annually since 1988, it started out as a video festival. In the early days the VideoFest, as it was called then, featured works which did not fit into the programme of the Berlin Film Festival - the star studded - drum role, fanfare - Berlinale. In the early 1990s the festival started presenting interactive works on CD ROM - I think this was called multi-media at the time. With changing technologies - adopting net art and generative and software art in the late 1990s - the festival kept true to its beginnings by maintaining the notion of critically engaging with new technologies and presenting a broad spectrum of alternative currents in art, technology and related theoretical production.

Until 2005 the festival carried the strap line ‘international media art festival’. This year, for the first time, the notion of ‘media art’ has been silently dropped. For the diligent observer of the field of media art this does not really come as a surprise but merely represents the ongoing confusion and blatant opportunism which marks contemporary production in the digital culture industry.

Since 2001 Andres Broeckmann has been artistic director of Transmediale. The task given to him was to sharpen the profile of the festival by inventing specific themes each year. His record, in that regard, is rather mixed, to put it politely. In 2001 Transmediale was devoted to do-it-yourself media which we are not really in a position to critizise (given that we are in the process of organizing Takeaway - festival of do-it-yourself media). What followed since then were ‘go pulic!’ in 2002, ‘play global!’ in 2003, ‘fly utopia!’, 2004 and ‘basics!’, 2005.

more >> http://www.mazine.ws/node/230