Our experiential world is widely determined by technologies.- Internet and mobile phones transform social relations; robotics revolutionises industrial production, while biotechnology affords a new relationship towards nature and body. Although technical products promise enhanced agency and security, we experience an increased disorientation:
The ethical question of what one should do and take responsibility for, is eclipsed by an immense number of options. The rules that govern political and personal agreements are undermined by new paradoxes. While a return to 'old values' is demanded in order to counter a general demoralisation, at the same time societal and technological basic conditions are changing so radically that such a return is rendered impossible.

Technologies open up fields of agency and provide interfaces for designing these personal and communal realities, - always also implying mechanisms of exclusion. However, in order to appropriate the creative potentials, it is necessary to know about the ethical and aesthetical effects of the technologies applied, as well as their limitations.
transmediale.05 explores the BASICS of artistic practice with digital technologies. The festival investigates the aesthetical and ethical foundations of a frantic and hyper-potential culture, and presents models of an artistic practice whose ethics derive not from past value systems, but from an appropriation of an extreme and contradictory, contemporary culture.