Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
3 – 7 February 2010
The transmediale.10 Salon consists of three interdisciplinary strands - talks, projects and workshops - exploring FUTURITY NOW!. With a specific focus on free culture and process-based projects, the Salon will engage cultural thinkers and makers into conversations and actions that lay down future strategies for a global network age.
In K1 at the HKW, transmediale.10 will continue the festival's tradition of strategic discourse with a curated set of Salon Talks focusing on the vocabulary and methodologies in digital art, politics and society questioning current takes on the concept of future. This year, process-led Salon Projects will transform the HKW foyer into a 'Futures Exchange'. Open activities, consultation sessions and project demonstrations will be running all-day, every day, throughout the festival. transmediale.10's Salon Workshops feature opportunities for hacktivists and retoolers, makers and doers, to get their hands dirty with a series of artist-led sessions that aim to visualise, capture and experiment with the essence of FUTURITY NOW!
Running across the entire salon programme is the Free Culture Incubator, a set of interlinked and participatory sessions led by Ela Kagel. In the public eye, the project will bring together stakeholders from the arts, science and business sectors and work on a business model for a cultural enterprise of the future.
The Salon Talks are the primary transmediale.10 site for elaborating on strategic artistic positions, examining new forms of digital practice and cultural dialogue. Positioning the future as a meme ready for redefinition, twelve salon events will bring together artists, theoreticians and specialists in a forum for open dialogue to address the implications of FUTURITY NOW! across a multitude of artistic platforms as well as from diverse cultural and societal backgrounds.
Investigating new artistic practice in the omnipresent context of web 2.0 social media, the renewed cultural interest in reaching for the Moon, cultural strategies against media control, Berlin's hidden psychogeography, and the influence of Vilém Flusser on transactional arts, the Salon Talks will feature each day of the festival in K1 space at the House of World Cultures.
Daily 'kick-off' salons within the Free Culture Incubator programme curated by Ela Kagel will examine the problematic zone of convergence between artistic practice and the creative industries, while on Wednesday 4 February, in two special extended salon sessions the Phuturama sub-conference will look at FUTURITY NOW! from the standpoint of speculative design and Science Fiction.
