Art Hack Day Berlin : Afterglow

The central exhibition of afterglow is in line with this year’s overall programme strategy to only exhibit new or commissioned works. In a curatorial and organisational collaboration between transmediale and LEAP (Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance), the festival has invited Art Hack Day as a grassroots event/exhibit format/community for artists whose medium is tech and hackers whose medium is art. This event gathers more than 80 participants working intensively for two days at the start of the festival to come up with an instant exhibition that responds to the thematic framework of afterglow. Collaborative in nature, Art Hack Day is a project dedicated to cracking open the process of art-making, with special reverence toward open-source technologies. As an event it bridges the gap between art, technology and entrepreneurship and expresses a belief “in non-utilitarian beauty through technology and its ability to affect social change for public good”.

More than 80 artist/hackers have been invited to create an exhibit from scratch during 48 hours, starting on Monday evening January 27, in response to the thematic framework of afterglow. The hack continues until the transmediale opening on January 29 when the Art Hack Day exhibition opens to the public, running until the end of the festival on the 2nd of February. During the festival week, the participants of Art Hack Day will interface with the various programme strands, giving artist talks, workshops and performances.

For this edition of Art Hack Day the participants were asked to respond to the afterglow theme of transmediale 2014, through the following brief:

As coders we fear the ‘legacy’ system, a piece of old junk we haven’t yet figured out how to throw away. As artists, we’re tempted by prolific outbursts of freshness and novelty; more art of less value. Businesses and government crave more data, more connections, more context. By embracing these impulses without contemplation we perpetuate the technological hype cycle and unintentionally shorten the half-life of our artefacts. Technology has become akin to a natural resource, generating physical and immaterial waste that is appropriated in such diverse contexts as e-garbage dumps, big data businesses and mass surveillance schemes. As such, trash is no longer what is just left behind but is central to our post-digital lives. When digital detritus piles up it decomposes, giving rise to a post-digital afterglow with the potential for new expression and new enterprise. Can we make peace with our excessive data flows and their inevitable obsolescence? Can we find nourishment in waste, overflow and excess? Can the afterglow of perpetual decay illuminate us?

Guided Tours:

Thursday (30 Jan) until Saturday (1 Feb), daily at 11:00 and 16:00 (duration: approx. 60 min, in English or German, 5 EUR / 3 EUR for student groups of 10 or more persons)

Introduction to the festival by Markus Huber / Kristoffer Gansing, tour through the Art Hack Day Berlin: Afterglow by LEAP / Olof Mathé, artist talks by AHD participants / David Gauthier & Jamie Allen
Meeting point: Infocounter at the HKW (please pay here before the tour starts)
Reservations via af[at]transmediale[dot]de (Anja Faltin) or via telephone under +49-30-24749-761

Art Hack Day Berlin is an organisational and curatorial collaboration between transmediale, Art Hack Day and LEAP (Daniel Franke, Kai Kreuzmüller, John McKiernan).

Art Hack Day Berlin : Afterglow

Art Hack Day Berlin : Afterglow

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