Core Audio visited the 20th edition of the Transmediale festival and Club Transmediale in Berlin. This year’s edition ran under the theme ‘unfinish!’. On this page you can read our complete review, including pictures and interviews.
Tuesday 30/1 _ openings night transmediale
Pierre Bastien
At the studio of the Akademie der Künste the French artist Pierre Bastien performed a piece on his ‘Orchestre Mechanique’, an ensemble of electro-motor driven musical automatons he constructed from meccano parts, playing on acoustic instruments from all over the world. Through the use of slide projectors all the details of his orchestra could be seen on large screens.
_ club transmediale
On Tuesday evening the Club Transmediale venue in Maria Am Ostbahnhof hosted performances by Liz Allbee, Esther Venrooy, Rafael Toral feat. Sei Miguel Quartet, Colleen and Svalastog.
Two days later we had an interview with the Portugese sound artist Rafael Toral about his new long-term work-in-progress, the Space program which will consist of three series : Space Studie, Space Elements and Space Solos. The core of the Space program is performance on electronic instruments. Further details are carefully explained by the artist himself.
note : the first Space Solo disc will be released in march by Quecksilber, in the interview you can already hear some fragments.
Wednesday 31/1 _ transmediale
Institute for Media Archeology (IMA)
The Austrian institute IMA was founded last year by Elise Schimana as a place for research in the work of female artists in the electronic media art field.
At transmediale they gave a lecture on the first two portraits of their DVD series called ‘IMA Portraits’ > portrait #1 Liesl Ujvary - portrait #2 Rebekah Wilson aka Netochka Nezvanova. At night, different artists of the IMA-group, such as Rebekah Wilson, Elise Schimana, Starsky and Ushi Reiter performed.
For the transmediale, Tesla opened all of its studio doors. All weekend long, the creative process behind media art could be experienced first-hand : twelve artists and projects groups currently working at Tesla explained and showed their work-in-progress > valentina vuksic, seiko mikami, jost muxfeldt, reboot fm, jens brand, sukandar kartadinata, omer krieger, gert-jan prins & bas van koolwijk, rodrigo derteano, jeff mann and michael schumacher.
Tesla
Tesla is Berlin’s laboratory for media art. It’s a production house and a laboratory for interdisciplinary work in the arts and media. In the diverse field of media performances, experimental music, audio-visual and interactive art, various new forms of artistic expression are created at Tesla, allowing expansion in space and time.
Artistic Director _ Transmediale 07
Andreas Broeckmann
After leading seven editions of the festival Andreas Broeckmann says goodbye to Transmediale. But before taking his leave we had a chat about this year’s edition Unfinish.
Stephen Kovats is the new artistic director of Transmediale. The Canadian architect was until now chief curator and programme developer at V2 _ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.
Friday 2/2 _ transmediale
Specification.Fifteen
At Transmediale, Minimal sound artists Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree performed their fifteenth collaboration, Specification.Fifteen released on their label Line. For this work they were invited by the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, to create a new live work inspired by the Seascapes series of the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.
At Transmediale they received an Award/Honourable Mention.
The piece premiered in March 2006 in Washington, Transmediale was very proud to present the European premiere.
And we were completely lost (in a positive way) after experiencing this fine work of art and we were even more delighted to have a chat with the two of them.
Saturday 3/2 _ transmediale
Transmediale Awards
Herman Asselberghs (BE) received the first prize for his work ‘Proof of Life’. The second prize was split between Antoine Schmitt from France and Tim Shore from the UK.
transmediale.07 jury statement
The work 'Proof of Life' is testament to the power of art to bring its audience into the present.
