Feb 3 / Preview of Day 3!

Feb 3 / Preview of Day 3!

Approaching the halfway point of the program, transmediale.11 is working through its themes of liveness, open source and open web and of course, RESPONSE.

Two BODY:RESPONSE workshops start the morning off right with 'body-building' models. The two-day workshop DIY Feminism Culture brings women into the realm of electronics, while Social ID deals with identity models that shift between data and the physical body. The 2nd part of the CoS: Identity also tackles the theme by promising to make ‘connective emergent “Identity” from scratch.’ …very curious to understand what exactly that entails!

And this afternoon, nominees of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award, Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, ask participants to deconstruct battery-operated toys in a presentation of circuit bending for their nominated essay, Zombie Media.

Last night’s Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2011, presented at the Canadian Embassy by Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation, was an ode to the open web and a nod to the predictions and developments of media and technology, ignited by pioneers like McLuhan and Richard Stallman. Surman gave a thoughtful presentation that encompassed themes of innovative thinking, punk rock and protection of freedom. Confessing that he would give McLuhan a set of Legos for his 100th birthday, Surman said that such a gift would represent the intent to build, as in ‘build upon the web’ as an open-ended medium, which can turn the web from a disruption of traditional medias into a reinvention.

Mark Surman’s lecture was a precursor to today’s presentation Counterblast: The Rogue McLuhan at 13:00, which looks at a subversive yet rarely explored text by McLuhan, which he initially distributed as a ‘zine’ manifesto in 1954.

transmediale Blog
by Melanie Sevcenko