Transgressions

Contemporary culture is characterised by the paradoxical juxtaposition of excess and control. While the transgression of aesthetical and moral borders is becoming as normal as the daily dose of shock and horror, we also learn to live with increasingly rigid mechanisms of control and exclusion. Are there any more ethical borders or walls against which art can rebel? And how significant are the aesthetic strategies of transgression within today's reality?

Within the transmediale conference the panel "Transgressions" (February 4, 16.30 hrs) deals with artistic and theoretical aspects of this antagonism between extreme freedom and control. Shu Lea Cheang, internationally renowned artist and cyber nomad, Jens Hauser, cultural journalist and documentary film director from Germany, and Katrien Jacobs, scientist, author and activist from the Netherlands will discuss borderline experiences in and with the media, hosted by Sigrid Schade.

"Mouthpiece-Pipe-Container. Effects and Defects of a Desiring Machine", a key note by renowned cultural theoretist Gerburg Treusch-Dieter (February 4, 19 hrs) tops the discussion off. Treusch-Dieter has been dealing with the gender codes of human-machine relations for many years. With a profound sense of humour and unrelenting questions she approaches the phenomena of contemporary life as well as those of historical mythologies, and connects and combines whatever belongs together. Her talk is devoted to the vacuum cleaner whose multiple psychological layers are exemplary for the way in which technologies and bodies are interconnected.

Mistakology

Every technology has its mistakes and accidents already built in. This insight is not new, but it is still consistently ignored in an approach to technology that demands it to be controllable and safe, functional and useful. Technical dysfunctionality is "repressed" by modern society, in a Freudian sense. Functional discrepancies between people and machines are called "human failures" even in cases in which the technology is making impossible demands on its human user. Machines and their mistakes are thus an inexhaustible source of humour and parody.

On the panel "Mistakology" (February 5, 16.30 hrs) Claus Pias, design professor and author of several books on media art, discusses with Canadian media art pioneer Norman White, whose "Helpless Robot" is on display in the exhibition SMILE MACHINES. The panel is hosted by Inke Arns.