Curated by Marcel Schwierin

The eight screening programmes and seven installations featured in transmediale 2014 focus on subjects such as the internet, surveillance, and Big Data as well as electronic, digital and analogue trash. The afterglow theme is seen as gloomy visions of the afterlife of images and technologies in which naïve dreams of a digital revolution, free exchange and equal participation no longer have a place. Instead, surveillance cameras film seamless state-ordered murders, video games reflect the nuclear contamination of the countryside, and e-waste and spirituality combine to create postcolonial revenge. Algorithms, the seemingly disembodied instruments of power in the new world, vaporize anonymously into the surroundings. Empty billboards, freed from the visual garbage of civilization, remain as dystopian skeletons in the landscape. Pervasive resentment of swarm intelligence is reflected in digitally generated search requests. People are cast out of society, treated like garbage, and then revolt. A boy is a landmine recovery expert. The countless images that we continuously produce grant us an imaginary eternity that even pharaohs couldn’t dream
of. In the programme, more central still than the images of society’s waste are the images of society as waste that have been artfully processed in the works. A total of fifty-three films, videos and slide shows from 1931 to 2013 are to be shown in eight programmes and seven installations, each programme with its own sub-theme. For the first time in the history of transmediale we are showing original, handmade films created from lost and re-composited images, the only film genre with no counterpart in the digital world.