It’s not easy for art and culture In times of recession and the threat of war, though their social relevance may become even more obvious.
In its 16th edition, the transmedlale festival again deals with the role that media art and media culture play today. The festival takes art seriously, both as an autonomous aesthetic practice and as a form of critical agency and commentary. After “Do It Yourself!” and “Go Public!”, the motto of transmedlale.03, “Play Global!”, implies a call to artists to take on the challenges offered by globalisation. We present critical, ironical, at times humorous artistic strategies for the global game and hope that the festival will become a market place for Ideas which help to develop a cultural counter-weight to economic and military forms of globalisation.

An event like transmediale depends on strong and reliable partners, which is why we are happy both about the substantial cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Goethe-Forum, and about the generous support which we again receive from ART+COM e.V., Ableton, HANSA Computer, Holsten Bierbrauerei, Luxoom, das werk novalisstraße, Native Instruments, Triad and others. The awards of the transmedlale competition have kindly been sponsored by AVM Computersysteme and by Avid Technologies. It is also vital for the realisation of the festival to receive the support from the Embassies and foreign Cultural Institutes, the Mondriaan Foundation and the German Foreign Office, because they have all made possible the invitation of many of the participating artists. The transmediale remains dependent on the support granted by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, which this year has given an additional grant to the club transmedlale which could thus extend its programming and include an extensive presentation of electronic music from Central and Eastern Europe.

The programme cooperations of transmediale.03 include the Federal Agency for Political Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) with whom we are organising the conference, and the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt/Main whose exhibition about computer viruses, “I Love You”, we have been able to bring to Berlin due to the kind support of the company, Trend Micro. We were also able to develop the programme partnership with different Berlin institutions which are presenting exhibitions and events in parallel to the festival and which thus extend the transmediale beyond Its locations.
We would like to thank the festival’s advisory board for their care and advice, the people at HKW, BKV and Goethe-Forum for their active support during the preparations, and most of all the festival team whose optimism and commitment has made tm.03 possible.