I’d just like to say a big ‘thank you’ to Anna, Gill and Ruth for organising/facilitating the trip to Berlin – they did an fantastic job!
Jules Lister
My Transmediale Hot or Not
Hot
Sonolevitation
This had it all really. It was made by physics but it looked like magic; tweezers-scale precision and a wall-sized projection; the live element turned it into a high-wire or trapeze act; the little gold shapes were brought to life and turned into butterflies. I even wondered if the maths of the way the shapes behaved was chaos, especially when the patterns started to get very irregular before they broke down.
Club Transmediale
Both the music events at night and the day programme at the asylum/school place. Club Transmediale seemed to be where all the energy was coming from, though the conference part of the main event at the weekend might have been livelier than the exhibition by itself.
Yasunao Tone
Like sitting in the middle of a storm being conducted by a friendly but bonkers professor.
The Bank of Common Knowledge –
interesting to see the application of online forms – open source, forums and so on – as the inspiration and model for face to face structures of “knowledge transfer” . Whether those models would work or not is something else.
Richard Barbrook –
Discussion: How Enthusiasts, Amateurs and Hobbyists Shape the (Music) World
This could have gone very wrong for me because I hate listening to people presenting an argument by quoting Marx (or anything else) as the holy scripture. But the fact that there was only him being interviewed, rather than two people, meant there was time to warm to him a lot more as he ran out of lecture-power and started to draw on his own observations. The “everyone can/should be an artist” position is pretty much where I stand, and certainly one of the things that’s potent about creative technology is that it’s given lots of people lots of opportunities to make and share things, but I think there have to be rule sets to enable that, so finding out that there is a Situationist board game was very timely and interesting, and I’m going to look it up.
Ambiguous Signalscapes
This was the eye tracker piece in the exhibition – you looked at a blank grey screen and then what appeared (to me at least) to be mountain ranges sprung up where your eye had landed. I think I wilfully misinterpreted this a bit, but it seemed to be about things not existing till they’ve been seen by whoever makes the map, and there is a long connection between maps and conquest.
Flat Pack Stools
at Club Transmediale. I wonder how much they cost?
Not
Bill Viola
“Step between darkness and light through water, almost like a sort of birth, or a death, which might be the same thing!”
Thanks Bill, deep.
Trite emotion, hammy acting and fake old-master-painting-style lighting.
Reichstag dome
At first glance this looks great, but then, especially when it’s lit at night, you see long rows of little figures, all trudging heads bowed in single file up an endless spiral, and about the best you can say is it looks like the mechanised hell in Metropolis.
Andrew Wilson
Yorkshire media arts trip to Transmediale …
“Looking beyond the evolving alarmist scenarios of environmental catastrophe prevalent in the global warming debate, transmediale.09 shifts the focus of this challenge to the broader cultural, societal and philosophical consequences that the collapse of the northern ice barrier reveals. Are we about to reach another historically succinct moment of unavoidable and revolutionary change, a point of no return leading to an unforeseeable global transformation akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago? Will it be a time in which we realise that everything will be different, without knowing how everything will be different?”
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