Tuesday, February 21, 2012

In Berlin, a Festival Focuses on the Contemporary Arts

This year is the 25th anniversary of Berlin’s alternative media arts festival, Transmediale. This five-day event, which starts on Tuesday at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt contemporary arts center, has a rich international program of artworks, installations, video screenings, workshops, performances and an interdisciplinary symposiums, all organized by various guest curators.

The Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Arts (CTM) will run concurrently in different venues around Berlin, and in collaboration with various Transmediale events. For festivalgoers interested in exploring audio and visual mediums outside of a gallery or screening room, check out the performance program Ghosts in the Machine, curated by Sandra Naumann. 

One of the highlights is the performance on Wednesday by the Joshua Light Show, the visual artists who appeared alongside the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors. The founder,  Joshua White, will draw on a cache of slide projections, archival footage, an assortment of light reflective objects and other things to create a performance combining both analog and contemporary digital elements. The group, appearing for the first time in Europe since the 1960s, will feature the band Supersilent and the guitarist Stian Westerhus.

Also, to mark the festival’s quarter-century anniversary, the program will be peppered with the history and evolution of media and art culture over the years in Germany’s capital, and all of the eight video programs will begin with a notable work from the Transmediale archive.
***

No comments: