TRANSMEDIALE 2018

The cloud allows us to understand how our data are available to view from any location – because they are distributed decentrally and, in any case, are still immaterial somehow. After a while, we forget that we’re even using metaphors. The original meaning recedes into the background, like the image minted on a coin once it has been in circulation for a while.

Old romanticism and heightened contradictions

This year’s Transmediale was the festival’s 31st edition and took place from January 31 to February 4. The festival in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin focused on the Internet, or more precisely, the fact that the Internet as we know it was not always so. Everyone knows, of course, that there was a time before the digital hegemonic powers of Google and Facebook, but hardly anyone can remember that murky prehistory of global interconnectivity. A little bit of this romanticism is nevertheless inherent in this festival. It’s about art, about images, about the politics of identity on the Internet, it’s about cryptocurrency, about memes and about everything that generates injustice in the Web.

The erstwhile utopias of the free Web have failed, she suggested, and instead of bringing liberation, the Internet has quickly transformed into a space where the contradictions of the analog world are heightened: race, class, gender.

Yesterday’s Post-Internet art

Now the Transmediale is not only a festival for future forecasts and political demands, but also for digital culture. Certainly, terms like post-Internet or Vaporwave apply only to a limited extent, to make precise statements about works of art. The latter was a hype that began around 2011 and quickly spread: Electronic music from samples of elevator music and Italo-disco. Gradually the melancholic sounds drifted by Soundcloud, YouTube and into progressive art galleries, but ultimately, Vaporwave migrated into the archive of sunken pop trends.

Why, asks artist Zach Blas on the third day of the festival, is the Internet presented as a globe? He knows the answer: because it is totalized. Because digitization has long since encroached on all areas of life, and it actually no longer makes sense to talk about the Internet as such. Indeed there is nothing left that is not linked up to it.

Eric Schmidt heads up Google’s parent company Alphabet. Google is one of the great colonizers of this globalized Internet – but he’s right when he says: “The Internet will disappear”. But not into thin air. It will disappear into the devices until every object has an IP address, until we no longer even perceive it – the idea of the Internet of things is born. The cloud is not immaterial, but rather has real political and social impacts. The metaphors may change, but the Internet has long since ceased to be distinguishable from reality.