unfinish! transmediale times twenty

The 20th transmediale festival for art and digital culture runs under the motto 'unfinish!', and takes place from January 31 through February 4, 2007, at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

The festival emerged as 'VideoFilmFest' in 1988, and 'unfinish!' is, on one hand, a reference to the fact that transmediale is in a state of ongoing change. On the other hand, the motto relates to artistic works with digital media, where 'unfinishing' is either the inherent drama of being eternally open-ended, or highlights the possibility of continuous transformation and advancement.

Within its theme 'unfinish!' transmediale.07 explores the conditions of finiteness and presents a range of artistic means and strategies through which seemingly fixed social and political situations can be kept in flux and open to change.

In this context the international jury, composed of Inke Arns (Dortmund), Eva de Groote (Ghent), Miguel Leal (Porto), Ellen Pau (Hongkong) und Mike Stubbs (Melbourne), nominated three works out of 1030 submissions from 59 countries for the transmediale award 2007:

'Proof of Life' is a 30-minute audio-visual work by the Belgian visual artist Herman Asselberghs. Its images show the interior of a deserted space, while the viewer's attention is directed to the sound track. Spoken words reflect on hostage-taking, and sounds of imprisoned life create a claustrophobic atmosphere, inspiring an intense reflexion about the human condition in the age of migration and global media.

'Cabinet', a film by Tim Shore (UK), was shot in the US-States of Montana and Wyoming, a sparsely populated and wild natural environment in which Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski wrote his 'Manifesto' against the industrial society. The sound track uses historical material from newsreels and educational features, even Edison's recording of 'Oh Tannenbaum'. This freely associating film essay reflects on the relationship between nature, culture and power, and on the imaginary space between words and memory.

A thoroughly 'unfinished' work is 'Still Living', by French artist and programmer Antoine Schmitt: Animated diagrams, similar to the well known graphics used for election analysis and stock exchange rates, are in constant movement – showing autonomously and eternally fluctuating statistics and ratios. While such graphical charts usually promise exact information, in this work they are caught in a nervous game of indecision and permanent alteration.

transmediale is funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes.