By Calvin Keogh  Berlin’s Transmediale celebrated its 20th anniversary this month with another of its annual multi-media extravaganzas. The original 'Videofest,' linked to the Berlinale film festival, was set up in 1988 as a forum for the developing medium of video. Ten years later, its name and description were altered to reflect the revolution in communications technology, and consequent blurring of media lines. This year saw the exchange of the subtitle ‘international media arts festival’ for ‘festival for art and digital culture,’ in a conscious move away from the ‘niche of media art.'
Transmediale showcases artists working with TV, video, computer animation, internet and other forms of digital technology. Flexibility of title and sub-title is itself pertinent as the slogan of this year’s show was ‘unfinish!’ the ‘battle cry and curse of digital work that knows no conclusion’. Questioning the relevance of closure and continuity in a culture increasingly dominated by rapid developments in technology, the festival focused on ‘where what seems fixed can be undone,’ investigating ‘artistic processes that are open to change and reversal of decisions.'
 Project Library. Photographer: Berlinvr.de
First prize for the exhibits went to Belgian artist Herman Asselberghs for ‘Proof of Life,’ a multi-layered video which plays with variant times and spaces. The viewer is presented with images of becalmed unoccupied spaces, while the soundtrack reverberates with a male voice evoking unsettling TV reportage, disaster movies, incarceration and hostage-taking. The disjunction between sound and image exposes a discrepancy between supposed security and the threat of parallel worlds experienced only as a two-dimensional media reality.
The second prize was shared. UK artist Tim Share’s ‘Cabinet,’ a ‘meditative and disturbing’ film combining images, sounds and text both original and archival, takes the Unabomber’s manifesto as its subject, examining humankind’s ambivalent relationship with history, mythology and technology. ‘Still Living’ by Antoine Schmitt of France is a screen of shifting graphics representing readable codes which, instead of developing rationally, produces unpredictable and imprecise images that undermine expectations of order and determination.
In tandem with the exhibits were a series of conferences on art, architecture, computer science and socio-political questions chaired by high-profile artists, scientists and academics. Keynote speeches were made by Friedrich Kittler of Berlin’s Humboldt University, who presented his current research on theories of ‘machine, media and music,’ and by Canadian specialist in technology and culture Arthur Kroker, whose ‘Born Again Ideology’ examined the sinister interweaving of technology and religion in the rhetoric of ‘American empire.’
The underlying theme, that digital culture by its nature rejects determination and instead promotes ‘processuality’ was perhaps best exemplified in ‘Fractal Flesh,’ a presentation by Cypriot-Australian artist Stelarc. In an experiment with ‘alternative anatomical architecture,’ a soft prosthetic ear was  Stelarc (au) - 'Extra Ear.' Photographer: Jonathan Gröger
Not everything was confined to the art academy and an appropriate measure was the out-sourcing of events to alternative media centers. All of the short films and videos were shown concurrently at the Filmkunsthaus Babylon movie theater while installations, performances and electronica-inspired happenings were offered at the Maria am Ostbahnhof nightclub. A shuttle service ran half-hourly to the Tesla center at the downtown Podwils palace for ‘open studio days’ at Berlin’s ‘laboratory for interdisiplinary work in the arts and media’.
Atelier doors were opened over three evenings from 6 to 11p.m. to enable the public to experience first-hand the creative process behind media art in the work of eleven artists in residence. Projects included a version of Japanese artist Seiko Mikami’s interactive installation ‘Desire of Codes,’ a dense matrix of sensors, light-spots and surveillance cameras that follow the movements of the visitor. In Jost Muxfeldt’s virtual kinetic sound-sculpture ‘Audio Kinematics,’ the spatial distribution of surround sound is determined by the mechanical principal of a mobile.
Sound sculpture also filled the studio space of New York-based and long-established artist Michael Schumacher, who stood by a grand piano while visitors came and went during ‘Room Pieces,’ a montage of field and additional recordings emanating from a ten-channel sound system. In ‘Recomputing Space,’ Peruvian Rodrigo Derteano examines the characteristics of urban soundscape, deploying on a walkable surface serially-arranged speakers which played sound recordings of public spaces abstracted from their actual settings.
If these works and other projects on view appear somewhat ephemeral and over-relient on explanatory texts, perhaps that is more to the point. The festival empahsises open-ended flux, the  Nicolas Collins (us) - 'Edition Edison.' Photographer: Jonathan Gröger
In studio 1 at Tesla, six disused computers, partially exposed and dismantled, purring and whirring, face off against each other in Valentina Vuksic’s ‘Sei Personaggi Part 2.’ Based on Pirandello’s play ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author,’ the work can be read as a metaphor in the spirit of Transmediale. In an age when traditional art forms are increasingly marginalised, there exists an on-going search for new means of expression. Battle cry and curse, ‘unfinish!’ may well be the new paradigm for art in its ever uneasy yet hugely potential relationship with technology.
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