Disruption in Dialogue: Transmediale 2024 Unveils Chilling Tales of Digital Content
The transmediale festival, running from January 31st through February 4th, 2024, is set to delve into the intersection of art, technology, and politics, addressing current global issues such as surveillance, data privacy, and ethnographic explorations of indigenous and Black counter-narratives.
The festival's title, "you're doing amazing, sweetie", is a reference to a famous meme from the Kardashians, reflecting the festival's inspiration from the reality of reality TV. Performative elements will be featured throughout the city, making for an immersive experience.
Nóra Ó Murchú, the artistic director of the festival since 2020, is the first woman to hold this position in the festival's 37-year history. This year's edition will explore the horrors of content and its influence on politics and political relations.
One of the main focuses is on the increasing blur between consuming content and performing it on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. This blur, according to the festival, can lead to poor representations of politics, as demonstrated by former President Donald Trump's online merchandising. Social media content in events like those unfolding in Israel and Palestine can also funnel people into simplified, binary political positions.
The festival poses the question of whether we consume content or whether it consumes us. Cory Doctorow, a famous Canadian writer, will give a talk about the "enshittification of the internet" at the festival, discussing how internet platforms start off serving users but end up serving those who made them, finding ways to get as much information and money from consumers as possible.
The centerpiece of the festival will be the AI-animated Uncensored Lilac by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan at Silent Green. The Uncensored Lilac explores how discourse is compromised through crisis, revealing the need to embrace multiplicities rather than always falling into a singular vision.
Over at Kunstraum Bethanien, the group exhibition "perfect, perfect, perfect" features new commissioned works by Laura Lulika and Sungsil Ryu among others. Online conversations often lack context, leading to miscommunication and misunderstanding, a concern that the festival aims to address.
The festival's focus is not on critiquing platforms or individual producers but rather on the way issues are solved. It has a particular interest in how Hollywood entertainment normalizes forms of surveillance and propagandizes forms of power and control.
In a world where content can have negative effects on political campaigning, such as the black square on Instagram during the Black Lives Matter movement, the transmediale festival 2024 aims to provide a platform for critical discussion and exploration of these issues.
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