As a prologue to the festival weekend, two days of workshop programming (29 – 30 Jan) take place at silent green, including open source investigations that cover topics such as designing somatic experiences, learning how to monitor protest action from afar, and understanding more about how images become evidence. The public opening of the festival takes place on the evening of January 30, including highlight performances by DeForrest Brown Jr., Tati au Miel, and more. This is preceeded by the Marshall McLuhan Lecture by Cait McKinney on January 29 at the Embassy of Canada. The techno-mediated installation and cyberperformance Purgatory EDIT by Ali Akbar Mehta is on view at transmediale studio from 9 January.

Unfolding across the weekend by destabilising the relationship between proximity and closeness, the festival’s core programme takes place across three days at HKW, presenting an extensive schedule across diverse formats, including conversations, lectures, performances, installations, film screenings, and off-site events.

From rehearsals of trans*crip technoscientific technologies that will expand our definitions of technologies to what it means to learn and share the skills needed to document police abuse at protests with image and video analysis and other open-source research methods: strands and threads from the festival’s prologue of workshops are woven throughout the programme, emerging most clearly in discussion connecting participants – who have led workshops, delivered lectures, screened films, or headlined performances across the festival sites of silent green and HKW – as they meet in unmediated conversations, a format that digresses from the formality of the familiar panel or a moderated Q&A.

Contributions by artists, activists, and thinkers including Olga Goriunova, Laura Kurgan, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Federico Campagna, Shaka McGlotten, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Mercedes Bunz, DeForrest Brown Jr., Cait McKinney, Alex Martinis Roe, Lindsey A. Freeman, David Isaac Hecht, Anna Engelhardt, Thomas Keenan, and Ren Loren Britton.

Presenting a curated series of short films by different artists, each film programme addresses a singular thematic of (near) near but — far. One programme defamiliarises us with the term ‘distance’ and commonly held understandings of it as a form of removal or disengagement. Instead, the films in this strand ask us to think of distance as the space between points of view across which we navigate to learn from one another: an understanding that, perhaps curiously, makes distance a quality of closeness. In another programme we are asked to consider how the intimacies of human movement within dance have become commodified through digital platforms. These films explore how the technology of the moving body can hack, bend, and refuse algorithmic modes of control.

The film programme includes works by 2girls1comp, Alex Martinis Roe and Alexandra Juhasz, Aaron Ratajczyk, Basir Mahmood, Bhenji Ra, Johannes Binotto, Charlotte Zhang, 업체eobchae, Hana Yoo, Lého Galibert- Laîné, Maud Craigie, Nina Davies, Simon Ripoll-Hurier.

A reading-stretching-running club will weave through Berlin, drawing a line from the McLuhan lecture to the closing hours of the weekend. Guided by Lindsey A. Freeman, the transmediale running club makes space for being a body and feeling a way through the city through acts of love, queerness, and running.

Drawing on Samra Mayanja's experience as a call centre operator for the National Health Service, the solo performance DEAD DAD DEATH CULT speaks to the continuous labour of empathy of being in a (dis)located position of proximity at the end of a helpline.

UNTITLED (iii) is a performance by Bhenji Ra, Tati au Miel, and SUUTOO, exploring trickstery as a fugitive practice and a catalyst for embodied emancipation. Through myth-making rituals they play with visibility, shadows, and voyeurism, guiding audiences into states of altered realities and darkness.

Performer Nina Davies and the artist duo 2girls1comp collaborate on a new performance work that draws from the contagion of NPC dance trends on TikTok and inserts those trends back into the gaming environment of GTA V.

Artists whose work materialises the destabilisation of proximity and closeness have been invited to occupy the public spaces of HKW. These installations will be periodically activated through performances, presentations, conversations, and film.

Set in a crash-test centre of the future, Felicity Hammond’s installation Dark Adaptation and an accompanying performance depict an evolutionary regression of the autonomous vehicle: one in which its sensors are hacked to collide with the fleshy rhythms of data that emerge from the human body.

Since May 2024, North Korea has sent thousands of balloons carrying waste – including Hello Kitty merchandise, e-waste, cigarette butts, and soil with traces of human faeces – over the border to the Republic of Korea. Activated throughout the festival, Hana Yoo’s installation uses the playful form of the balloon to explore the ambiguity of the medium and its message.