transmediale 2014 afterglow and The Embassy of Canada in Berlin present three cooperation events in the framework of the annual transmediale Marshall McLuhan Lecture

Space Junk Lecture by Douglas Coupland – Embassy of Canada
28 January 2014
Doors open: 18:00
Event start: 18:30 (please present a valid photo-ID at the door and allow sufficient time for Embassy security)
Embassy of Canada, Leipziger Platz 17, 10117 Berlin
In English; free admission, please register via: www.mcluhan-salon.de/en/calendar  

The transmediale Marshall McLuhan Lecture invites a Canadian cultural figure, whose work expands on McLuhan’s media theories in the context of contemporary culture and society. This year, the Canadian writer and visual artist Douglas Coupland will deliver the lecture, entitled Space Junk. Following his iconic writings on the first digital workers Microserfs in the 1990s to the digital natives of JPod (2006) and his biography of McLuhan You Know Nothing of my Work! (2011), Coupland will use his unique way of expressing ideas—almost a form of stand-up comedy—to explore the ultimate fate of our junk data and where hyperdigitization will take us in the end. As he alternates between the sacred and the profane, a new form of discourse emerges that engages both academic and populist spheres.

Slogans for the Early Twenty-First Century Exhibition by Douglas Coupland – Or Gallery Berlin
26 January 2014
Opening: 26 Jan 2014, 17:00
Exhibition: 26 Jan - 2 Feb 2014
Opening hours: 12:00-17:00
Or Gallery Berlin, Oranienstraße 37, 10999 Berlin
Free admission 

In addition to his Marshall McLuhan 2014 lecture, Douglas Coupland will exhibit his post-digital Slogans for the Early 21st Century (2013-14) in an exhibition presented by Daniel Faria Gallery, transmediale and the Embassy of Canada at the Or Gallery Berlin. 

This is an ongoing body of statements Coupland has been working on, in which he has made a consistent effort to “Try and isolate what is already different in the twenty-first century mind as opposed to the twentieth.” Many of these slogans – 80 will be shown at the gallery – have appeared in the Posthasteism manifesto conference in Beijing, summer 2012, organized by Shumon Basar, Joseph Grima and Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as in the Armory Show, New York, 2012 and Coupland’s 2012 solo exhibition at the Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto. A version of these were also be included in Coupland’s Nuit Blanche Toronto installation, Museum of the Rapture, at Toronto City Hall, 2012.

Coupland states, “If you were to attach a stick to each of these slogans and carry them in the street, would they read as protest or would they read as complicit guilt? For example, twenty years from now, were I to look at a picture of someone holding up a slogan reading ‘being middle class was fun,’ would that read as heartbreaking prescience or as rational acceptance of a by-then sociological certainty?”

Douglas Coupland will have his first museum retrospective, Everywhere is Anywhere is Anything is Everything, opening at the Vancouver Art Gallery, summer 2014. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first extensive publication on Coupland’s visual practice. Coupland has also recently released a collection of essays, Shopping In Jail, with Sternberg Press.

McLuminations 14:1 Counter-Environment Infrastructures and Substrata of the Global Village Discussion with Baruch Gottlieb, Jamie Allen and David Gauthier – Marshall McLuhan Salon
1 February 2014, 14:00
Special opening hours McLuhan Archive: 31 Jan 2014, 12:00 - 18:00 and 1 Feb 2014, 14:00 - 18:00
Marshall McLuhan Salon, Embassy of Canada, Ebertstraße 14, 10117 Berlin
Free admission 

transmediale and the Marshall McLuhan Salon of the Embassy of Canada present a new edition of the discussion series McLuminations, Counter-Environment - Infrastructures and Substrata of the Global Village, moderated by Baruch Gottlieb and featuring the transmediale 2014 residency artists Jamie Allen and David Gauthier. Together they will analyse the artists’ understanding of “infrastructure critique” attempting to elaborate the connections with and departures from McLuhan’s concept of “Media.” The Marshall McLuhan Salon has the largest audiovisual archive about the media philosopher Herbert Marshall McLuhan outside of Canada, and will be open during the festival.

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Eschewing art-and-technology practices that incline towards some kind of “future,” CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE looks for a “clearer picture of what are present technologies are, what they do for us, what the say about our culture, hopes, desires, needs.” (Parikka) CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE at transmediale 2014 is a survey of the post-digital media landscape, creating projective data viewpoints and slices through the database. The new datascape, always interpreted and intensified, is interesting to us as a Mcluhanesque “anti-environment,” a couterpoint to the invisible statistical habitat in which we live, the quantified lens through which we scrutinize the world around us. The resolution, intensity and projection of instrumentally derived data, measurement and quantification realises “hot” and “cold” literacies, anew—yet again “reprogramming of sensory life.” (MM) Further, CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE creates a self-critical institutional form—a magnification of what scaffolds and subtends an art and technology festival, through points of view and lines of sight. As such, the project intends to engage with Mcluhan’s thinking of relationships between individual and institution, sense and media, the “soul” and technologies. The media-technical landscape is here home to “an administrator in a bureaucratic world... a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

McLuminations, a special series of video discussion events

Initiated and directed by Baruch Gottlieb as a special series of events during the McLuhan Centennial Year 2011, McLuminations aims to elaborate in a form of lively discussions the electronic media experience. As electronic technologies give a fragmented rather than a completed image, the audience is forced to fill in the missing details, creating their own image and projecting a new reality.2 Without any time for reflection, interpretation or reaction, people “are less in habit in abstracting single aspects, single levels” and in establishing individual critical approaches, instead through total involvement of their “whole being” they “are accustomed to a more inclusive and totally sensuous commitment to situations”.3 McLuminations employs archival video material of Marshall McLuhan in attempts to articulate the contours of what McLuhan calls the “in depth” participation of the inhabitants of an instantaneous electronic media environment.

transmediale Marshall McLuhan Lecture is a cooperation between transmediale and the Embassy of Canada in Berlin.