Rose Jennings
www.transmediale.de
Where have all these people sprung from?
The correspondent of the Berliner Zeitung could barely credit the numbers –
2000 people at the opening alone – who attended Transmediale, Berlin’s
digital art festival. The location may have had something to do with it.
Transmediale formerly ran at Podewil, a large but somewhat lugubrious
midtown arts complex. This year it moved to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt
in Tiergarten. This airy fifties building with its eccentric cantilevered
front formed a perfect backdrop to the event. Or perhaps it was the label,
or lack of one? Though hacks call Transmediale a digital arts festival, the
organisers seemed to have taken some care this year to bill it merely as a
Medienkunstfestival – a media art festival. Very nologo.
Transmediale encompassed an exhibition; a series of debates and screenings;
an awards scheme; and workshops debating such inevitable topics as the
nature of public space in the new digital era – does it exist, and if it
doesn’t, how do we invent it? The exhibition highlighted the extent to which
sound has become an integral part of the landscape. Jocelyn Roberts’ video
installation showed a plane that is also a bird – that is, a white shape
against a blue background that is clearly discernable as a plane, but that
performs fluid swooping movements, against a background of chirrupping,
tweeting noises. The literature records only that the work was made in 2001
– but you’ll guess which month comes to mind. The programme runs on constant
re-edit, so there’s no final version, no cataclysmic resolution.
Robotlab’s ‘Juke-bots’ select, pick up, and perform scratch compositions on
vinyl LPs – just like real DJs. Though the software enables the viewer to
influence what they do, they can’t absolutely control the robots’ range of
movements. The joke’s on the DJ – grumpily defending their ‘creative’
position against the forces of digitalisation – and on the public, who
allowed them to occupy that position in the first place.
Kenneth Rinaldo’s Autopoiesis is more complex, but equally suggestive. A
forest of creepers – suspended robot-sculptures made out of Cabernet
Sauvignon vines jointed with polyurethene – sing and sway, touching the
viewer and each other, in response to information conveyed by infrared
sensors and cameras. The robots’ ‘group consciousness’ sometimes overrides
the individual machine’s reaction to the spectator, giving one the peculiar
sensation of being courted and then ignored.
Some of the best works were the most transparent. Jonah Brucker-Cohen, who
works for MIT in Europe, presented Crank the Web. This web browser comes
with a manual crank handle – the page loads faster or slower according to
the cranking speed.
Alexei Shulgin’s Busking 386 DX took the form of an old 386 PC mounted on a
pallet outside the entrance to the building. Using a simple text-to-speech
programme, the crusty PC ‘sang’ doleful versions of sixties pop classics,
and collected coins in a little box. Shulgin comes from Moscow, where he’s
known both as a pioneer of web art, and one of its most voluble critics. I
would guess he’s thinking as much about waste of expertise – the issue of
who gets the cushy new media jobs, and who doesn’t, is very relevant to
Berlin – as cost to the environment.
Can software be understood as a cultural artefact? The judges had
shortlisted four projects in their software award category, and these formed
the basis for one of the discussions. British programmer Alex McLean worked
with something called ‘forkbomb’. This wilful nugget of code sets in
progress an irreversible system of division and duplication within the
programme – like cells dividing – such that in no time at all the process
table fills up and the computer stops. If one represents each process as a
sound and an icon, you get ‘an artistic impression of the system under
strain’. Joan Leandre from Spain represented the opposite; a system
liberated from constraint. He reprogrammed the software on a driving game so
that the cars no longer obeyed the rules that governed gravity, navigation,
and so on. Germans Daniel Hahn and Dietmar Schiffermüller wrote a programme
which dug up information randomly from files on a hard drive, and floated it
in a moving banner across the bottom of the screen. (The digital equivalent,
perhaps, of colonic irrigation.)
One could speculate endlessly about the cultural implications of such works,
and this the panel – Manfred Fassler, a ‘media anthropologist’ from the
University of Frankfurt; Matthew Fuller, a London media theorist; and
Margarete Jahrmann, an Austrian artist – duly did. The general conclusion
was that although software development is becoming more conceptual, there is
nothing in the process which is beyond culture. Or, as McLean had it: ‘these
are very human environments, very much formed by human minds’. Human minds,
however, can become very set in their pattern of assumptions, and this was
the problem debated in other discussions. Not, how do you resist the
oligarchies, but which position do you resist from?
Generally, when I hear the word ‘surveillance’, I tend to hit the snooze
button. This was set full on for consideration of the antics of one Cyberman,
a Garbo-like creature who staggers round the world filming people filming
him, as it was for a presentation by the likable bunch of chancers who
hijacked the WTO web page. Hoaxing is all very fine and dandy, but it’s not
quite the whole story, is it? After all, as someone noted on about the 57th
mention of the Situationists, Débord and co. didn’t just confine their
activities to dériving and détourning – they actually got as far as writing
The Society of the Spectacle. We need a modern equivalent, that reckons on
new narratives of complicity.
Transmediale 02 took place at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 5 – 10 February 2002..