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Visualizing the Basics

Just like last year, this year’s Transmediale started with an annoyance for me: I had forgotten, that the opening was for press and invited people only. I wasn’t invited nor did I organize a press pass for myself. Despite the prospect of hearing Catherine David speak in French (1) (instead of not at all), I was clearly not prepaired to stand in line and talk my way in.

Abschreckung statt Aussperrung!

I wonder what kind of policy this is: Locking out people because they don’t have a professional relation with the event. It seems in an odd contradiction with the ideals otherwise promoted at the festival. I can’t imagine that it is so difficult to determine a ticket price, so that not too many people actually buy a ticket (or better even: so that a big enough space for everybody who’s interested was affordable).

As a compensation I got to see the sky ear performance in front of the building, in which balloons filled with helium and equipped with LED’s and some cellphones were wavering in the sky above Tiergarten. The LED’s react to electromagnetic fields (caused by weather as well as by radio signals such as incoming phone calls to the cellphones ‘on board’).

This rather beautiful visualization of natural phenomena (weather) along with socio-technical phenomena (phone calls) was a nice synthesis of my afternoon visit to a couple of galleries in Berlin Mitte. At Johann König I saw “Dänische Schweine und andere Märkte” by Tue Greenfort. In one of his works Greenfort references Hans Haake’s Condesation Cube (2). Instead of just water, Greenfort uses Vittel (the empty bottle is placed next to the cube). The installation seems to say: The time when we could innocently look at natural phenomena is over – economical phenomena have become part of our environment with laws as inevitable as the laws of nature.

(1) It wasn’t the first time I saw a sign indicating that David will speak French – and I wonder if the sign is a political statement (I don’t speak english and I’m proud of it) of if it’s a sign of modesty (I know that most of you dear visitors don’t speak French). Personally I don’t care, because esthetically I like French accents almost as much as actual French. My comprehension of both is also sufficient in most cases. Talking about it: One of the coolest French accents can be heard taking guided tour in English at the cave of Lascaux.

(2) The work dates from 1963 and constitutes of a glass cube filled with a small volume of water, which evaporates and condensates on the screen (pretty much what I have as a permanent installation in all the double glass windows of my apartment). Obviously this was before Haake focused on social and political topics and before he replaced visualization and generative procedure with symbolic installations.

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