Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
30 January – 3 February 2008
The meetings of the Bilderberg Group, a shadowy melee of the West’s leading political and business leaders, military and media strategists and other unnamed but purportedly influential figures have remained one of the world’s best kept secrets since the Group met for the first time'in 1954 at the exclusive Oosterbeek Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands. Initiated by Polish emigree Joseph Hieronim Retinger (1888 – 1960), with the active support of Dutch Prince Bernhard (1911 – 2004) the meeting was convened to counter fears of a loss of American influence in Western Europe during the rapidly intensifying Cold War.
For the next five days transmediale.08 has invited an equally eminent group of artists, activists and researchers to its own counter-conspiratorial Bilderberg Salon. Each daily session, presented and chaired by a special guest host, is a privileged backroom for strategic digital culture that will become the festival’s thematic arena for an open exchange and debate into contemporary, conceptual and highly conspiratorial artistic practice.
The Peenemünde Salon
Hosted by xxxxx
xxxxx introduces a series of research findings from artists and groups active within historically charged and speculative techno-illusory locations. These acronym-laden (i.e. W.A.S.T.E) strategic operations theatres (SOTs) create the settings for investigations and performative actions outlining strategies for contemporary, conspiratorial and paranoiac practice, both artistic and theoretical.
TRANSITformations Salon
Hosted by Kyd Campbell (Montreal)
The ‘transportation’ of guests and visitors in formal festival and public situations requires the submission of ‘s e lf to a constant state of transience without losing the 'body' in the contexts of circulation and movement, ambiguous spaces and machine technologies. It's no subtle secret, the participants here want you to listen to them and they want to change you. They want to induce mechanisms for choice and enable you to select and create structures for flexible and strategic action.
The Co-opting strategies Salon
Hosted by Nat Muller (Rotterdam)
Focusing on the creation of a new public context for technological art, the salon will explore strategies for trans-disciplinary collaborations at the intersections of aesthetics and intimacy, technology and politics. Through the projection of work beyond the confines of a Western cultural lens, direct interaction with an erratic process of media speculation place art into the role of surrogate cultural negotiator.
The Lud/d/ic Society Control Room
Hosted by Marguerite Charmante (Zurich)
Mechanisms of hegemonic power, of benevolent dictatorship, on the right to freely access products of the human mind are questioned by practice and theory. Such a theory vs. practice session juxtaposes the structural play of a conspiratorial afternoon against the palaver of a command centre unfolding into a psycho-organic parallel reality
The Bilderberg Future_Brunch 101
Hosted by Federico Bonelli (Amsterdam)
Bonelli cooks us up a Future as only Marinetti could have dreamt it... a future so close to nil. Fleeting moments of mad optimism and the extremes of a space / time envelope banging on the doors of the impossible. Just a crack open, the door reveals a chaotic little garden...
Conspirational Behaviour: Who is Terrorising Whom?
Special event
Humboldt University social scientist Andrej Holm was arrested July 31, 2007 one year after German federal police linked his writings on gentrification to his known political activism and thus started a terrorism investigation. Dubious behaviour were enough to issue an arrest warrant for being involved in the alleged militantgroup. Anne Roth's resulting blog (annalist.noblogs.org) discussing the case and its consequences has become an international forum tracing the line between the real threats to freedom of movement and expression against the growing insecurity of a state apparatus meant to guarantee these constitutional rights.
