transmediale 2025

Add. Join. React. Prompt. Lurk. Tip. Trade.

Digital systems address us in ways that engender a ‘performance of proximity’: a choreographed algo-rhythm that shapes our politics, our labour, and our relations to one another through the smoothed interfaces of our devices. From ASMR battles with whispered trash talk to children who speak to their parents like Alexa, from e-girls selling their bathwater to skin-riding robots serving your drinks, algorithms reform our human need for connection by advancing new proximities as a replacement for the closeness we yearn for in the times we live in.

For transmediale’s 38th edition, (near) near but — far will form an understanding of how algorithms place us in weird proximities and new intimacies with one another and the qualities of closeness we lose by way of their machine-driven actions. By attending to the affects of proximity and closeness, the festival will reach beyond constructing a dichotomy of the two terms to ask: how can the capacities of technologies foster relations better adapted to responding to the complexities of our individual and collective discontents?

An extensive discourse and performance programme will be presented at transmediale’s long-standing host venue, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The festival will include lectures, conversations, screenings, performances, and interventions. As a prologue to the festival, two days of workshops and working sessions will take place at silent green Kulturquartier, transmediale's Berlin home, and will require separate registration. The public opening of the festival will take place at the Betonhalle of silent green on the evening of January 30, 2025. The annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture will take place at the Embassy of Canada before the festival’s public opening.

transmediale 2025 follows a renewed curatorial approach, shaping both the festival’s theme and programming methodology. Two curators, Ben Evans James and Elise Misao Hunchuck, lead the thematic focus and curatorial research. Additionally, they have invited a group of programmers – artists and researchers – to contribute to the festival while expanding collaborations with long-standing partners. Further details on the extended curatorial team and the programme will be shared soon.