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Friday

The Friday programme presents a great collaborative performance by Nina Davies and 2girls1comp. Nina Davies video work Precursing shows a future world in which pedestrians move like NPCs [non-playong character] to avoid collisions with self driving cars. 2girls1comp’s (not actually made up of two women) work Dancing Plague uses game modding to elicit the entire digital population of the GTA 4 world to execute the ‘Strip_club_private_dance’ command, in reference to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague. The two works are linked beautifully in a performance by four live dancers, who combine elements from movements in both works.

I’m not sure any of the presentations I see that day are elucidating when it comes to AI. A performance by Portrait XO and Dan Gorlick doesn’t speak to me about the climate data of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which the algorithm was trained on. Instead it is more reminiscent of sped up building recordings. Ali Mehta’s installation Purgatory Edit, part of the festival at its silent-green location, has an interesting premise, but evokes doomscrolling more than the brainwave experiment it claims to reflect. In general, these works neither clarify the technologies behind them nor provide insight into the information powering them. Instead, they further obscure the processes that generate the vast plethora of ‘content’ into which all footage is flattened. On the other hand, Rick Farin’s performance—one of the collaborative elements between Transmediale and its sister festival, CTM—features AI-animated faces of haunting, myth-like figures, decaying dolls, and arresting aliens set against a chilling industrial soundtrack. At times, it genuinely feels like being trapped in a Midwest car crash or a haunted house of soul-stirring AI horrors.

Saturday

A talk by Tobi Haslett, called on a painting by Hamishi Farah, in conversation with curator Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung proves a highlight to the festival, for its cathartic address of the seemingly unsayable. In front of him on the stage, Haslett shows Farah’s painting Untitled. It depicts Joe Chialo, the Berlin State Senator for Culture and Social Cohesion, and a likely candidate for Minister of Culture after this months’ elections. The painting by Farah was meant to be exhibited on the wall for the duration of the festival, but this invitation to exhibit was altered when the figure of Chialo was proposed. The festival suggested to bring the painting and display it ‘as a prop’ instead.

Chialo is ‘the face of the most ambitious attempt to punish support for Palestinian freedom’. In December 2023, in the shadow of the war in Gaza, he introduced a non-binding resolution requiring all recipients of state cultural funding – which is to say, all artists presenting at this festival – to sign a clause pledging their opposition to antisemitism. The definition of this, adopted from the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, conflated ‘antisemitism’ with criticism of the state of Israel, effectively making it illegal for artists to publicly oppose the genocide in Gaza (or the occupation of the West Bank, for that matter). The resolution was withdrawn last January, but the crackdown on any public showings of solidarity with Palestine remains – cultural center Oyoun had 100% of its funding cut due to alleged ‘hidden antisemitism’. Haslett, razorsharp, quick-witted, and slightly self-derogatory, historicises the painting through an analysis of laughter – its psychoanalysis, its political potency, and the ‘unbearable lightness of the German situation’. He mirrors the inability of this painting to be exhibited here to Gerhard Richter’s portraiture of members of the Rote Armee Faktion, a 1970s group opposed to the German state through radical actions.

Nonbinding resolutions, like the one Joe Chialo proposed, amount to strategic indeterminacy of a state that expects overcompliance in the face of funding cuts. Such funding cuts hang over Transmediale too, and Haslett raises that all those institutions that censored themselves in order to be the ‘good ones’ still got or will get their funds slashed. He claims the conversations that we thought we would have as an art world at this juncture are being completely bypassed. And this, at its very basis, is the outcome: at a state-funded art and technology festival, you are not permitted to show a painting of a sitting senator.

The kind of speech that emerges when one cannot speak about Palestine amounts to euphemistic jargon. The most bizarre of these omissions appears in Thomas Keenan’s contribution, How to Make a Refugee, in which he spends 50 minutes analyzing a similarly titled video work by Phil Collins from 1999. While the talk offers insightful analysis of the construction of an image of a Kosovar refugee boy, it is a bizarre choice to center a case study on a geopolitical situation from 25 years ago without acknowledging the hundreds of thousands of people who have recently become refugees. Anna Engelhardt responds graciously, using her 2023 video work, Terror Element, as a prompt to discuss the construction of evidence—examining how forensic labs are represented to shape the figure of the terrorist.

Sunday

In Letters from the Unmoddeled, AI researcher Catherine Griffith puts the actions of action group Just Stop Oil in the UK centre stage. It introduces the police’s use of a new type of AI modelling – motion tracking – that analyses the changes to his family life, and his convictions to stop climate change. It proposes this as a model against AI tracking, a more human form of connecting to the realities of direct action. In the responding panel, Marija Ristic, part of Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Team, addresses the local forms of suppression: ‘If you would’ve asked me who makes culture in Germany before October 7th, I would’ve said artists make culture. But after October 7th, it is clear to me that it is the German state who dictates what culture is in Germany’. Anna Engelhardt leaves the audience with a lesson in dictatorships: ‘if you think it’s bad now, wait five years’. She gives the example of cultural institutions in Russia: those that had the opportunity to discuss the occupation of Crimea in relative freedom—without police interference—chose instead to self-censor. This contributed to a closing down of the space for dissent, such that those spaces and networks did not exist when the real crackdown began.

The lecture ends with a reading of a letter by a prisoner convicted of participating in Just Stop Oil’s actions, describing the conditions in the jail. After a strong opening, the Sunday programme strikes a remarkably more light-hearted tone. A hilarious video by Daniel Felstead of found footage intermixed with original voiceover operates as a useful and cunty explainer of AI Utopianism versus Doomerism. Samra Mayanja puts on the Dead Dad Death Cult featuring sound clips, animal noises, imagined bystanders, and an audience participant trapped in an audition to play her dad for the rest of their life. The phenomenal performance, more of an autofictional play, presents itself as a series of absurdist vignettes in which the performer ends up with no underwear on, smashing whipped cream pies over the curator.

Despite the peppy energy that this day brings, tension keeps bubbling to the surface. A talk by Silvio Lorusso addresses Digital Maximalism at a time of precarious and expensive housing; he entertainingly posits the sublet Instagram story as the true practice of many independent artists. Afterwards, he is asked a question by an audience member that was more of a statement on seeing 16 months of desctruction through our screens, about Transmediale as an organisation not doing enough. This is a very strange situation: you’re not allowed to talk about Gaza, October 7th, Staatsräson or German memory culture in any way directly, but you will also be punished for not to properly encrypting these subjects enough in your undertone.

Scheduled simultaneously to the festival’s closing remarks is the Archive of Silence – a communally sourced and carefully managed Google doc that accounts for the censorship, silencing, and cancellations that have happened in the German cultural sector since October 7th. Its entries are screened in quick succession with information on the institution, the targeted person(s), and a description of the cancellation. The document is publicly accessible, but seeing it on a silver screen alongside a totally silent audience in a dark room holds a new weight: the breadth of the censorship, the diversity of its targets, and the arbitrariness of actions deemed forbidden is truly shocking. Leaving the dark room, you cannot deny that the German cultural sector has been thoroughly reshaped.

The closing panel brings together a wide range of speakers to address ‘technology, solidarity and its various relations’ – those slippery chestnuts. Speaker Asia Bazdyrieva introduces that the group has agreed to assert ‘no absolute statements on solidarity’ but to share ‘concerns that relocalise our definition of it’. Indeed. This vague prompt brings about such insightful zingers as ‘I agree that feelings are important and information is important’. There is truly no internationalist project here; a mere disappearance into the granularity of the German situation of the twenty-first century. The audience is enticed to think of ‘what can you do to help today, to help the cause’ – which remains unnamed.

Many of these programmes are exercises in doublespeak. If the space for artistic freedom in Germany is granular, it also shrinks to the scale of a morsel—blink and you’ll miss it. The introduction of Tobi Haslett by curator Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung stands out as one of the few moments that break through this censorious climate, and it is worth reproducing in full: “Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, I have asked myself what it means to continue “curating” or “making art” in Germany; a place so laughably provincial at the best of times, but has now amplified its contempt for the Palestinian people to such grotesque extremes that its provincialism regulates art and cultural production through the dogma of profound racism. It bears repeating that Germany’s Staatsräson formalises and officiates into state policy a decades old unwillingness to see the Palestinians as people oppressed by the Zionist entity, and seeks to turn every person in this country into a fanatic of the genocidal culture that motivates the so-called “State of Israel.” To those artists and cultural workers who have been so indifferent to genocide, and insoucient enough to stay within the lines prescribed by the Staatsräson, your inability to address the catastrophe at hand has stripped you of all artistic and moral legitimacy. To these people, one has nothing left to say. But, to everyone else: what can be said?”

Indeed: what can be said? Silences, at least, can be archived. As festival organisers face off with hostile funders with engaged audiences, the window of the admissible has profoundly contracted. What is said within the space that’s left does not bode well for the coming modes of governance. In the face of such vehement suppression, I had hoped for a cultural field that could maintain more space for a steadfastness in their positions.