transmediale 2007

unfinish! demanded the re-opening of artistic processes that are deemed closed and questioned finality in order to claim that any given situation is full of potential. The festival concentrated on the point at which, what seemed fixed can be undone, reversed, processed differently, and it questioned the importance of continuity and change. unfinish! is the battle cry and the curse of digital work that knows only consecutive versions instead of conclusions. A paradigm of digital culture?

The exhibition media-artistically reflected the paradox of the discovery of reversibilty and repition of physical processes and erasure of the past in the frame of the continuously ongoing world. The means of staging demonstrated by definition change, repitition and the potential for making new decisions: the performances of different artistic sections experimented with working processes whereas the conference meetings dealt with continous and consecutive updates in a digital culture bound to ever new versions of processuality.
Never being able to conclude can thus be boon and bane for cultural practice in a world of preliminary at the same time. Consequently, the jury nominated those art works which attempted to redress an emotionally arrested development of technologies and mediation and thus combining aspects of finality with reversibitly.