Text by Estela Oliva
transmediale Festival returns to Berlin another year with a programme of conversations, screenings, performances and artistic interventions. With a theme titled End to End the festival explores and questions the role of “networks” as social, technological and artistic infrastructures. Alongside an exhibition and a programme of events, the two-day symposium will take place at Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre on Friday, 31st and Saturday, 1st February 2020.
The symposium brings together artists, technologists and activists from around the world to discuss and engage in the festival theme and related topics, such as the future of artistic creation. For their closing event Future Worlds of Entanglement, the transmediale 2020 team have prepared a double-bill programme that wants to take the audience on a journey to explore the possible future of art through simulations and virtual reality performances.
The event features an interactive performance with avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon who performs alongside Montreal-based artist and composer Myriam Bleau‘s music in a unique live experience using a virtual stage partly unfolding through audience interaction over Wi-Fi networks. This collaborative project called Eternity Be Kind exposes the codified spaces of performance and hints at a different future for personal and musical representation. Navigating between hyper-pop, mythical symbolism and baroque hints, the artists propose a multilayered experience of collective mise en abyme.
The evening also features the screening of artist Lawrence Lek’s first feature film AIDOL 爱道, a computer-generated fantasy film set in 2065 which tells the story of a fading superstar, Diva in a post-AI world in which machines have the capacity for love and suffering. Produced using 3D techniques, gaming software and motion capture technologies, AIDOL is the sequel to Lek’s 2017 film Geomancer. Through its unique aesthetic and narrative, AIDOL defies the concept of genre, engendering a fictional space that is alternately recognisable and alien.
transmediale 2020 End to End takes place between 28 Jan and 01 Mar 2020 in Berlin. Future Worlds of Entanglement: Eternity Be Kind + AIDOL 爱道will be on show on 01 February 2020, from 20:00 to 22:00 at Volksbühne – Großes Haus.
