transmediale 2025 festival

Renowned Berlin-based festival for digital culture that brings together artists, designers, international researchers, and activists with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era (transmediale.de). For almost forty years (since 1987), transmediale has been one of the key leading international events for discourse and critical reflection on post-digital theory and practice. Each year the festival brings together around 300 participants and 4,000 visitors across a diverse programme of exhibitions, screenings, keynotes, lectures, panels, and workshops.

Following transmediale’s model of appointing new artistic leadership each year, I partnered with Elise Misao Hunchuck as co-Artistic Director of the 2025 festival. This included (i) developing the curatorial theme for the festival’s 38th edition; (ii) programming, design, and production of over 50 events featuring over 300 international participants across two venues (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Silent Green) including lectures and conversations, performances, installations and exhibition, film programme, and workshops; (iii) writing of curatorial and publication texts; (iv) hosting of conversations and panels; (v) artist residency programme and education programming; (vi) strategic partnership development, grant writing, and donor fundraising; (vii) budget administration, and staff management.

Festival Theme:
The 2025 festival was entitled (near) near but – far and interrogated how digital platforms – and the algorithms that underpin them – are reforming our human need for connection by orchestrating us into ever new proximities and weird intimacies with one another. Easing the flow of capital, these proximities flatten forms of intimacy such as those (i) embodied in distinctive ways, (ii) shaped by time into particular configurations, or (iii) influenced by specific forms of cultural expression. In response to this flattening, the festival set-out to evaluate how technologies might nurture alternate forms of connection that can better respond to the qualities of what it means to be ‘intimate’ with one another as we work to respond to the complexities of our individual and collective discontents.

Example Programming:
Keynote lecture by Cait McKinney: Delivering the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Embassy of Canada to Berlin, McKinney delved into the intersections of queer and sexuality studies, media theory, and digital activism focused on their research on the online “blackout” as a digital tactic rooted in AIDS activism. McKinney explored how protest tactics were translated from the analogue to the digital and how marginalised communities leverage media technologies to build connections, share knowledge, and inspire collective action. They also discussed how concepts of relationality were formulated within the digital and computing sphere, and how theories of intimacy and sexuality can foster a deeper understanding of digital infrastructures.
Installation and Performance by Nina Davies: Commissioned work focusing on feedback loops in which digital and physical bodies shape one another by tracing NPC movements from game worlds to TikTok videos, and into real-life contexts where they go on to inform predictive technologies and AI systems.
Workshop and film screening with DeForrest Brown Jr. and Ari Benjamin Meyers: Exploring the intersections of Black experience, industrialised labour, electronic music, and media theory through a workshop underpinned by music making, writing and discussion. Through these acts, the workshop foregrounded the social, political, and economic histories shaping techno and Black creativity to advance critical dialogue about race, technology, and cultural heritage within media arts contexts. Brown’s workshop and talk was followed by a screening fo Ari Benjamin Meyers film, ‘Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut’ (2024).

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