Stephen Kovats is transmediale’s new director

Stephen Kovats will be the new artistic director of transmediale, Berlin’s annual festival for art and digital culture. His appointment was announced at a press conference on Friday in the Akademie der Künste, where transmediale.07 takes place at present. Hortensia Völckers from the German Federal Cultural Foundation, and Moritz van Dülmen, managing director of transmediale’s administrative carrier, introduced Kovats to the general public.

Born in Canada in 1965, Kovats was until recently chief curator and programme developer at ‘V2_Institute for the Unstable Media’ in Rotterdam. Initiator, designer and head of international projects in Europe and worldwide, he was active as an educator and researcher at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation during the 90’s. There he founded the Electronic Media Interpretation Studio (EMI), through which he initiated and ran ‘Ostranenie’, a major festival for art and media culture focussed on Central and Eastern Europe (1993-99). His is a fluent speaker of German, English, French and Hungarian.

Stephen Kovats studied architecture in Ottawa, Canada, where his work addressed the connections and shifts of perception within the cultural, social and media aspects of modernism and urbanism. The shift of society and cultural landscape in Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall has been central to his work, for which transmediale’s geo-political location in Berlin is of significant importance. He regards the festival as a forum for inter-disciplinary and genre spanning presentation of contemporary art, which draws its energy from individual passion and global processes. transmediale.08: conspire!