Transmediale Festival is about to open in Berlin, projected into the future vision of possible decentralised models. Within the main theme of the Festival, “ End to End” the exhibition The “Ethernal Nertwork” will feature about twenty-five international art and research-based works to address the persistence of networks, with a focus on their potentials and limits in response to current social and technological changes and the need for new forms of decentralization.
In times of environmental crisis and political turmoil, networks have lost their mass appeal. Whatever we hear about them is usually in the context of a backlash: blackouts, propaganda, hate speech, addiction, and a desire to disintermediate by disconnecting from the platforms of surveillance capitalism. Still, networks have become ubiquitous and essential organizational tools for both activists and big politics, and whether digital or analogue, they seem to have become both poison and cure. Now that the limits of networks are more tangible, the exhibition readdresses “the network question” as being about future models of sociality, technology, and politics in societies after globalization.
Structured according to three lists of key concepts and technocultural shifts, The Eternal Network also features historical materials that relate to the legacies of critical net cultures as they formed in the early days of the public Internet in the 1990s. Their starting point is the eponymous pre-Internet concept proposed by Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, which predicted new possibilities of exchange in an emerging global world.
In the context of this pre-Internet imaginary of networks, the works and projects included in The Eternal Network exhibition close the loop between the pre- and post-Internet moments. With the backlash against networks in mind, it re-examines the legacies of critical net cultures, asking if and how they will continue to have an emancipatory relevance in the future.
(from the press release)
The Eternal Network, curated by Kristoffer Gansing with with additional advice from Clemens Apprich, Daphne Dragona, Geert Lovink, and Florian Wüst, 28.01 – 01.03.2020, HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Con opere e progetti di: Ursula Biemann, Blank & Jeron supported by Sakrowski, Tega Brain & Julian Oliver & Bengt Sjölén, Johanna Bruckner, Guo Cheng, Contemporary And (C&), convex tv., Louise Drulhe, David Garcia & Eric Kluitenberg, David Gauthier, Kyriaki Goni, Darsha Hewitt, Aay Liparoto, Olia Lialina, Alessandro Ludovico (Neural), Robert Luxemburg, Piratbyrån, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Bahar Noorizadeh, Ruini Shi, Timur Si-Qin, Solveig Suess, Jelena Viskovic, and Tobias Williams.
transmediale Festival, HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 28.01 – 02.02.2020
transmedialeis project by transmediale and.V. e Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
images: (cover 1) transmediale 2020 – promotional image (horizontal) – The Laboratory of Manuel Bürger (2) Eternity Be Kind by LaTurbo Avedon and Myriam Bleau – LaTurbo Avedon and Myriam Bleau, Eternity Be Kind at Mutek 2018, @Courtesy the artists and Ella Rinaldo. (3) Swatted by Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis. Film still from Swatted by Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Production by Le Fresnoy, ©2018, Courtesy of the artist. (4) Molecular Sex by Johanna Bruckner – Molecular Sex, 4K Video, production still, Johanna Bruckner, 2019. (5) After Scarcity by Bahar Noorizadeh – Bahar Noorizadeh, After Scarcity, Courtesy of the artist.
