PCA Transdisciplinary New Media Cohort Takes Berlin
This month, I hopped on a plane with my fellow cohort of PCA Transdisciplinary New Media students and flew to Berlin for this year’s Transmediale, a festival that highlights connections between art and technology. It was my first time in Germany, and I was thrilled to join a PCA-coordinated trip that allowed me to explore a different culture and soak in all of the art – at the festival and beyond – in such a creative and vibrant city.
Upon arrival, we took the train from the airport to our hostel and grabbed some lunch. Then our teacher and chaperone Miyö Van Stenis, who has spent quite a lot of time in Berlin, gave us a little tour of the city.
We saw the Funkturm Berlin, a radio tower that seems like a space-age version of our Eiffel Tower in Paris. We stopped at The Brandenburg Gate, a historic 18th-century landmark of Germany that once marked the start of the road from Berlin to Brandenburg an der Havel. In the Cold War era, it was obstructed by the Berlin wall and is now seen as a symbol of Germany’s tumultuous history as well as its resilience.
The next day we went to the opening party for the Transmediale festival, which took place in a venue called Silent Green, located in a repurposed crematorium. At the event, we saw new media art including mixed media projects including a VR-integrated video work called Purgatory Edit. This work uses an artist-created dataset called “Doomscroll Archive,” which uses media with varying amounts of violence and visual stimulation to track user response using EEG brain waves for analysis. The response of the user curates the way the videos are played, creating a symbiotic relationship between reaction and viewing.
The next day Transmediale formally began, kicking off with a panel that centered on the theme of this year’s theme – “(near) near but — far”. The participants discussed how current networked and technological environments shape, capture, and exploit social interactions, reflecting on a workshop whose title draws from Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi’s poignant quote: “in love as in boxing, everything is a matter of distance”. Throughout the festival, we enjoyed panels and performances further exploring that topic – including how digital systems create a ‘performance of proximity’ that influences our politics, labor, and relationships through device interfaces.
We saw a variety of sound art performances, physical performances, and talks about the current state of new media, art, and algorithmic proximities. As I work on learning new skills at PCA and researching my thesis, I took a lot of notes and returned to Paris with so many new dimensions to my practice and my research.
In addition to the events at transmediale, our professor took us to related art events at Panke Gallery, a gallery in Berlin that focuses on digital and net-based work. We watched some real-time visualizations and sound shows, which were made using technology like visual programming language TouchDesigner, which we have been learning to use in class. Another evening at Panke gallery we went to an exhibition entirely on phones, where each artist made apps and short videos for viewing.
Also, the food in Berlin was lovely – I think we all had our fill of doner and currywurst by the time the weekend was over.
Many of us, myself included, had never been to Berlin and it was an amazing chance to explore art in new ways. I will be thinking about this trip for a long time!
Blog post written by Kari Paul, MFA Transdisciplinary New Media
