transmediale is Berlin’s annual festival for cultural activities crossing art, culture and technology.
For its 26th edition, from 29 January to 3 February 2013 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, transmediale once again calls for contributions.

Entries are now open for the transmediale 2013 programme which will consist of installations, film and video screenings, workshops, performances, talks and discussions. Even though transmediale is always interested in works exploring new technologies, either as a theme or as form, no genres or media are excluded.

The exhibition programme is particularly oriented towards artworks that explore ambiguous and problematic relationships to technology and challenge common perceptions of it as a rational or creative tool. The video programme is devoted to contemporary artistic video works and experimental film screenings with historical references. Live audiovisual manifestations of old and new media form the main focus of our performance programme. The workshop and talk programme explores the critical dimension of networking, hacktivism, media theory and the politics of technological development.
THEMATIC FRAMEWORK
BWPWAP – Back When Pluto Was a Planet
The Imaginary Museum I

Can impossible and unrealistic uses and abuses of technology be translated into new cultural imaginaries? Into networks out of place and out of time? Like BWPWAP!?

Back When Pluto Was a Planet: with this title transmediale 2013 will explore the simultaneous displacement and invention that takes place in cultural processes mediated by technology.

BWPWAP is a popular net culture acronym referring to the cancellation of Pluto’s planetary status in 2006 and is commonly used whenever one wants to point out that a statement or opinion is resting on no longer valid data. It can also be read as the recollection of a poetic imagination rendered obsolete by new technological knowledge paradigms. The decision to degrade Pluto’s status in the planetary system is a testimony to how new technologies and discourses decontextualise networks that were once thought to be stable and lead to recontextualisations that are reshaping the very imaginary ofculture.

transmediale 2013 calls upon artists, users and theorists to contribute to the creation of new cultural imaginaries, where behaving like BWPWAP is a dissident creative act. On the one hand we are looking for works that interrogate processes of techno-cultural displacement: outsourcing, digital labor, user-generated content and prod-usage as phenomena that work to redefine cultural production. But equally we are interested in processes of invention: when networked collaboration and participation have become compulsory components of a new cultural industry, what are the critical technological practices? We recognise the user as a highly inventive figure occupying this techno-cultural landscape with all sorts of unruly and irritated behaviour, far beyond the straight-jacket of the notion of “the ideal user.” In the digital business world, where the user and not the customer is king, what kind of user agencies exist and how can we grasp the complex games of adaptation and appropriation that have unfolded within online as well as offline user cultures?

Is still open also the call for the Vilém Flusser Residency Programme for Artistic Research supports projects and activities which are simultaneously conceptual and practice-based. The programme is geared towards the initiation of new research or to the further development of existing projects.

More information available on transmediale website.

Source: transmediale.de