The festival design for transmediale 2014 afterglow dealt with the afterglow phenomena on various layers, mostly by playing with dichotomies of our daily lives in post-digital conditions. The visual world opened up a more heterogeneous discourse than former festival editions. This diversity also became apparent in the new corporate identity of transmediale, which strongly supports the transversal thinking.

The most significant aspect of the visual world is the composition of the imagery: The fields of association deal with media excess, information access, material e-waste environments states and conventional stress compensation methods like yoga or spa treatments. By combining these elements, the design products generate a feeling of being "in between" technological and more or less anthropological dogmas, which are nowadays imposed by different forces – they actually start to intermingle. By these means the pointer of "what role we have to play or believe in the state of the afterglow" is set to zero (0): A new, problematic and stressful living condition for human beings, which has to be discussed at the festival. Moreover, there are many other references which can be explored. The afterglow logo typeface relates back to the font Roboto used in the Google Glasses campaign and tops the design approach with a very contemporary techno-commercial look. The festival website and its gimmicks enhance this feeling as well. Slickness plays an important role in this case – an "uneasy" feeling appears just at a second glance! Concepts like techno-fetishism and yoga get turned inside out. The critical perspective becomes evident only slowly and progressively.

The festival issue of the transmediale/magazine extends the referential world by appropriating the visual language of a global and hyper-commerical magazine culture (with the "flight magazine" as a vanguard), and putting it into this years’ concept of post-digital conditions. It generates differences by the heterogeneity of

Festival design 2014 by The Laboratory of Manuel Bürger.