berlin diary transmediale part 1:wings of desire

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From: Christina McPhee <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 00:37:50 -0800 (PST)
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: berlin diary transmediale part 1:wings of desire

Berlin Diary Transmediale 03: Play Global! (1)


wings of desire


Sunday night made the fast train from Hamburg. Dropped
off gear at the hotel, then raced to catch the S-Bahn
from the west side through snow falling in regular
slash marks against the ink. Traveling across the city
to the east, I was headed for Club Maria at the base
of the Schillerbr?cke, the Schiller Bridge. The
streaming snow muffled concrete details of the vast
topographies of Schloss Bellevue, Freidrichsplatz,
Potsdammer Platz.

All was as ink and sliver as the angels? perceptions
in ?Wings of Desire.? From the train window , the
vast new architectural project of central Berlin
slipstreamed, limned now , post Wenders, in realtim
by the white noise-like slash marks of ten thousand
electronic illuminations. Cyber urbanity like a skein
enveloped and cached the hidden old city and its
fierce memories. The Ostbahnhof station was deserted.
Lost by an erroneous exit, I had to hunt for the
soundstage of Transmediale?s club scene below parking
lots and empty kiosks.

Through an empty boulevard whose snows, punctuated by
taxis and the occasional black dog, feathery snow
trails led down to the base of a prewar bridge, where,
tucked against pylons, stood Transmediale?s Nighttown
incarnation. Club Maria am Ufer, announced its
concrete block and stucco presence with the touch of
surveillance cameras and a neon sign, as if to slouch
like a cowboy bar in Wyoming after closing time. The
intelligence inside was powered by (at that moment)
Random Incorporated?s ?de(feat)? on sound and image
sampling from Jesusalem streets–interpolation of two
divided cities in a multiplicity space.


Thus Berlin unfolded its austere pleasures. The city
as noir cinema prelude to a daytime explosion.

The synoptic /synaptic festival zipped manically
from one high intensity node to another. By day
Transmediale was brightly ensconced rom in a swank
sixties surround in parkland? at the House of Culture
of the World, built in 1959. Elsewhere, venues like
Podewil for sound workshops and performances, and the
Akademie der Kunst for retro shows like Valerie
Export?s pioneer performance/video made for an always
already saturation of action?jodi was in another part
of town,?you had to just try to forget that you
couldn?t clone your body into the multiple tvenues.

The House of Culture, on John Foster Dulles Alle,
held core conference, lectures and workshops.
Ironically the military/industrial epic tone of the
building accentuated the utopian feel of ?Play
Global?. With its swoopy auditorium curves, its
marble slab details and paneled Kennedy style glam,
the House of Culture acquiesced to the hacker invasion
as if to descendents of the fab four. www.maas.de
created an elegant solution for a media lounge with
beanbags and monitors that seemed to seemed to float
with an airy nonchalance. TV screens looped videos
from the images section of the transmediale
competition, in case you had to miss the theatre
screenings, a humane touch, since it was so hard to
make it to everything. These played together with
monitors for the software art and interactive works
online.

Ambition to ?Play Global? propelled an aggressive
foray into representations of modes of being and
presence. Conferences, performances, lectures,
screenings and workshops invoked a communal, often
dissonant social space as the realm of the moment .in
digital practices among collaborative visual,
performance, sound and video artists, coders, dancers,
gamers, tactical media and net workers. Roles
blurred. Sheer simultaneity of works in multiple
locations turned transmediale 03 into a microcosm of
its own desire for a global layered representation.
Moving about was like having a situationiste brain
scan.

I was hunting for a place to stop playing. I wanted
that moment of still reconnaissance, when you know you
are seeing something for the first time that is at the
same time something that seems to have been known,
watched, desired or loved for a duration, before you
or after you, antecedent to your consciousness,
subliminal to your expectations, recursive to your
desires. Something takes you into a suspension with
wings inside the circus spaces of the festival.
Simultaneous transference or global play generates a
game curve on the inside of your skin and heart. This
happened on the intimate scale of a hundred
conversations by day and late into the night; as the
glowing ganglia of the artwork lost out at its edges
to the intense human to human synapses. Torolab,
bootlab, trinity session, de waag. Kunst was inside
the connections.


(more in part 2, transmediale 03

the end of traveling)




??????????????christina mcphee www.naxsmash.net
www.christinamcphee.net








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<http://www.naxsmash.net>

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