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transmediale 2013 BWPWAP Press Release
transmediale 2013 boldly goes BWPWAP
Back When
Mobile phones were still dumb. Letters travelled by pneumatic air. And Tweeting was mainly done by birds. You were calling up Bulletin Board Systems. World economy believed in itself. Only schools were using Facebook. We had nine planets.
Pluto Was a Planet
For its 26th edition, transmediale – Berlin's festival for art and digital culture, boldly goes BWPWAP, Back When Pluto Was a Planet. On the 29th of January to the 3rd of February 2013, with the programme lasting one Pluto Day, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt will host exhibitions, performances, film screenings, conferences, and workshops.
True to transmediale’s ideal of integrating theory and practice, international thinkers and practitioners in the field of art, culture and media, will explore new ways to engage with the histories, practices, and futures of familiar objects that have been declared somewhat obsolete. The demotion of Pluto to “dwarf planet” status will be used as a metaphor for the constant shifting of technology and knowledge paradigms that drive the creation of new cultural imaginaries. The festival will demonstrate how a moment of crisis in classification may be appropriated as a canvas of opportunity.
Throughout the geography of the HKW, visitors will be able to interact with Octo, a reenactment of Berlin’s Rohrpost pneumatic mail delivery system, which will serve as a satirical commentary on social networking. Fusing an old-school bureaucracy with the age of data-mining, watchful “moderators” will document users’ private experiences in public interactive spaces.
Three conceptually connected but independently effective exhibitions will be presented under The Miseducation of Anya Major. Included are works of generative artist Sonia Sheridan, the Tools of Distorted Creativity group exhibit, and an Evil Media Distribution Centre that offers to misuse familiar objects brought about by the artists Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji known as YoHa.
Conference keynotes and panels, will feed discussions of the four BWPWAP threads: Networks, Users, Paper, and Desire, questioning their shifting role in society. Speakers will include philosopher and classification specialist Ian Hacking, historian of science Lorraine Daston, and astronomist Michael Brown - responsible for the demotion of Pluto’s planetary status.
Two world premieres will accompany keynotes, and include British “avant-retard” artist People Like Us’ with Consequences (One Thing Leads To Another), and cross gender artist Diane Torr’s new stage show that confronts identity and classification stereotypes.
The Everything but the Planets film programme will include screenings like Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s contemporary take on The Annunciation, which begs the audience into experiencing the unfamiliar in the familiar, and Turner Prize candidate Elizabeth Price’s User Group Disco.
Partners of transmediale, CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music and Arts, will simultaneously present The Golden Age themed music week at independent venues, exploring the (over-) abundance of music in the modern world and its consequences for individuals, aesthetics, politics and economy.
Early bird tickets are now on sale, and accreditation applications for press and professionals are available through the 15th of January, 2013. You can now download our Press Kit containing further information about this year's theme, the festival in general and the biographies of the curators. A detailed programme will be released in December.
More information about our all-year activity in the form of the reSource platform and residency, a history debriefing, and our Archive content is available online.
transmediale is funded as a cultural institution of excellence by Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
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| Pressemitteilung_en.pdf | 146.16 KB |
