Nóra O’ Murchú, the festival’s artistic director since 2020, concludes her tenure as festival director this summer after leading four editions of transmediale festival. Nóra O’ Murchú served as the first female artistic director in the festival’s 37-year-long history. During her directorship, she remapped the festival’s position as a leading space for critical thought on technology and digital culture.
Responding to the urgencies and new temporalities of the pandemic, Nóra O’ Murchú started her directorship with a year-long festival edition in 2021. transmediale 2021–22 for refusal combined a variety of programmes and exhibitions that mapped out the political agency of refusal. The curated online platform Almanac for Refusal was updated monthly over the course of a year and was later published in a limited, hand-crafted edition. Returning fully to IRL, the 2023 festival a model, a map, a fiction presented an extensive three-day conference programme alongside two exhibition projects. The festival edition concluded with the co-published book A Short Incomplete History of Technologies That Scale. transmediale 2024 operated under the title you’re doing amazing sweetie and brought the festival’s community together to question the toxic logic of content production. The festival’s programme was accompanied by two major exhibitions on view for two months.
Committed to developing long-term relationships with artists, Nóra O’ Murchú established a residency programme with new partners and institutions. In her time as artistic director, she conceived new festival formats, initiated diverse collaborations, and opened new ways of engaging with transmediale’s community and thinking through and with digital culture.
The transmediale team is deeply grateful to Nóra O’ Murchú for her extraordinary commitment to the festival. Her thoughtful and critical curatorial approach and perspective on the institution have been generative for the festival. We wish her all the best in her new endeavours.
transmediale’s 2025 edition will take place by the end of January 2025 under an adapted organisational format. A first overview of the festival will be announced by the end of the summer. The position of artistic director, starting from the 2026 edition of the festival, will be advertised shortly.