Transmediale: Festival for Art & Digital Culture

Transmediale: Festival for Art u0026 Digital Culture BERLIN FEBRUARY 3-7, 2016 From Skype duets to an artist shaking hands with one thousand people and then taking Microbiome Selfies of the germs on his hands, from a performance of a flying drone to a brief history of the air-raid siren, from angst about maker culture being co-opted to complaints about the creeping complicity of the sharing economy with neoliberalism, Transmediale is an annual five-day festival in Berlin that approaches digital art, technology, and culture from a mind-bogglingly diverse panoply of conceptual, theoretical, and disciplinary starting points. The twenty-ninth festival kicked off the first evening with the zany and delectably strange Superschool: Conversation Starter, a lecture-performance that attempted to transform an internet chat room into a performance. With an anything goes, off-kilter intelligentsiau0027s game show feel, complete with a gong and three experts seen only as dark silhouettes behind a screen, the performance centered around a cyborg-like man in a half stupor reciting fruitless Wikipedia searches in a drone-like computerized voice, as well as boisterous interventions from planted audience members. Brooding, portentous, and imbued with a claustrophobic feeling of enclosure, Sophie Hoyleu0027s memorable video essay Anxious to Secure (2016) added a foreboding tenor to the Inner panel, a discussion of security politics within the digital age. Moderated by Theresa Zuger, the panel began with Martin Hartmannu0027s discussion of different typologies of trust within political philosophy and the pressure that classical notions of trust are put under in the age of ubiquitous surveillance. It concluded with Hoyleu0027s video essay comprised of a stream of hard-hitting, even damning, pronouncements about the prevalence of anxiety disorders and psychiatry as a tool of biopolitical control, woven into a larger context of the complicity of the American Psychiatric Association in the War on Terroru0027s use of torture, and a citing of Giorgio Agambenu0027s theory of the state of exception to justify extrajudicial killings in the United States. Ridden with a bleak, indefatigable suspicion of the nefarious motives of various institutions (government, psychiatry, military) and with periodic intertitles such as Inner Security: Anxiety from the to the Geopolitical, Interpersonal Security and Technology, and Geopolitical Security and the Discourse of Crisis, Hoyleu0027s video gave a stunning indictment of the contradiction of the US intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan to putatively uphold international law on human rights violations, while simultaneously using interrogation methods defined as torture under international law. Reading almost like a manifesto with dense nuggets of texts, the video statements by themselves might have come across as plodding or monolithic were it not for the beguiling seventeen-minute accompanying audio collage consisting of a pulsating, grinding doppler-like wave sound, a helicopter sound, a metallic clanging, and an anxious, gasping breathing. On a jauntier note, with the requisite perky enthusiasm of aerobics instructors, complete with headbands and sweatsuits to match, visual artist Liat Berdugo and choreographer/dancer Phoebe Osborne held an aerobics class in which the aerobic exercises replicated movements we make with our hands while navigating iPhones, iPods, and mobile devices in their lecture-performance Unpatentable Multitouch Aerobics (2015--present). With a class of fifty participants clad in aerobics gear, Berdugo and Osborne began with such an impeccable personification of the bubbly can-do aerobics instructor, I found myself curious to see if this persona was meant ironically (it was). After forty-five minutes of aerobics, the group sat in a circle and began talking about the affective dimensions and notions of intimacy embedded in the new gestural lexicons engendered by our use of mobile devices. …