Multimedia Festival Transmediale 05 in Berlin

Under the patronage of the German Ministry of Culture and with half a million euros per year guaranteed for the next five years, the multimedia festival Transmediale 05 (www .transmediale.de/page/home.0.2.html) opened its doors in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin from 4 to 8 February 2005. The fact that the Ministry of Culture has admitted the Transmediale to its elite group of "beacon" projects of best-practice contemporary art alongside the Donaueschingen Music Festival, Ensemble Modern, and other media events such as the Kassel Documenta, is an indicator of the importance the German government attributes to new media art.

The festival began in 1988 as "Video-fest," a sub-project of the Berlinale Film Festival, long before the days of popularized internet, digital art, and electronic-ambient music, and morphed into "Transmediale" in 1998. It has since established its place as Germany's largest and most prestigious festival for new media art. Today, the festival is divided into two parts: the Transmediale (T05) that, reflecting its origins, is dedicated primarily to moving image art, and the Club Trans-mediale (CTM; further information can be found at clubtransmediale.de/), a parallel platform devoted to music started in 1999 to bridge the gap between "art and Berlin club culture" (electronic dance music).

The vast program of T05 encompassed some 11 conferences, 27 lectures, 27 exhibitions, 8 performances, 100 screenings, a prize competition, 15 workshop exhibits where visitors could construct their own digital gadgets and robots, as well as myriad partner exhibitions. CTM encompassed further concerts, dance events, cinema screenings, and installations. Director of it all was the loquacious Andreas Broeckmann, who managed to moderate or comment on almost all events simultaneously.

In contrast to the broad festival themes of recent years, such as "remainders of utopian potential," globalization, or public space, T05 questioned the "basics" of contemporary culture in the areas of biotechnology, politics, and media art. "Our perception of what constitutes our basic needs must continually be redefined . . . The festival investigates the aesthetic and ethical foundations of a frantic and hyper-potential culture and presents models of artistic practice whose ethics derive not from past value systems, but from an appropriation of an extreme and contradictory contemporary culture." What in the program booklet had the flavor of a leftover modernist manifesto turned out in practice to be a playful, imaginative, and many-sided festival (the program can be downloaded from www.transmediale.de/ page/files/download/download/tm05 _schedule.pdf).

However, before "getting down to basics," the thorny definition of terms had to be dealt with. Multimedia; electronic, digital and sound art; Klangkunst; sound installation; time-space collage; audio-visual art . . . the array of terms was nearly as varied as the panoply of definitions. Artists, curators, academicians, and philosophers from the USA, Asia, and Europe offered background, history, and definitions. No final consensus was reached, nor was one sought. The diversity of approaches and lack of established canon are testimony to the fact that the new media area is still in its baby shoes; technology and theory are developing more rapidly than they can be analyzed and classified. The charm and innovation of the exhibits owed much to the unselfconsciousness of a new field, as yet unshackled by convention.

Theme "Basics"

The theme of the conference, "basics," turned to the fundamentals of art and to the ethics of contemporary society. It also represented (to this American viewer) a notable attempt to escape the navel-gazing often characterizing traditional art in "old Europe." The exhibits in the "basement" venue reflected the conference's theoretical underpinning and offered dialogue with artists and insights into their approaches. Portable shelters developed with and for street people (paraSITE, USA) or prisoners's inventions (Temporary Services, USA) drastically marked the "ground zero" of basic needs. A Geiger counter for "corporate fallout" was a mordantly witty device, using bar codes and a database of genetically modified foods and corporate behavior to detect the ethical status of groceries at the...