transmediale is a Berlin-based festival and year-round project that draws out new connections between art, culture and technology. The activities of transmediale aim at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies. In the course of its 28 year history, the annual transmediale festival has turned into an essential event in the calendar of media art professionals, artists, activists and students from all over the world. The broad cultural appeal of the festival is recognised by the German federal government who supports the transmediale through its programme for beacons of contemporary culture.

In the scope of its acclaimed annual festival, transmediale presents 20 000 visitors with an extensive range of exhibitions, conferences, screenings, performances and publications. Each year, a specific theme provides the framework for hundreds of artists, media activists, researchers, designers and other creative tinkerers to engage in reflective, aesthetic and speculative positions in between art, culture and technology.

The exhibition programme presents thematically curated works in combination with a selection of entries from our annual call for works. It is particularly oriented to artworks that challenge us to rethink our everyday relationship to technology, old and new.

The conference and workshop programmes depart from the festival theme and use it to explore the critical dimension of networking, hacktivism, media theory and the politics of technological development. Throughout the years, renowned speakers from the academic and artistic fields have taken part either as keynotes speakers or conference panellists. The workshop programme connects and expands on the projects presented in the other programme sections and offers both practical and discussion-based approaches in more specialised and intimate settings.

The video programme is devoted to contemporary artistic video works and experimental film screenings with historical references. It encompasses a wide, contemporary spectrum of short artistic video works and special programmes of artist retrospectives, thematically related feature films or documentaries.

Live audiovisual expressions of old and new media form the main focus of the performance programme. The programme presents cross-disciplinary projects in the fields of installation, sound, performance and video on stage, showcasing the search for new forms of expression between artistic genres. Moreover, CTM Festival (formerly club transmediale) takes place in cooperation with transmediale, presenting a parallel programme dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music.

Since 2011, transmediale also has an all-year ongoing activity in the form of a new project platform and a residency programme. These activities provide a sustainable structure of feedback, research and reflection that interacts with the yearly festival.

The reSource for transmedial culture is a new framework for transmediale festival related projects that happen throughout the year in the city of Berlin. It is an initiative that extends into ongoing activities with decisive touchdowns at each festival. The objective of the reSource for transmedial culture is to act as a link between the cultural production of art festivals and collaborative networks in the field of art and technology, hacktivism and politics. The reSource works in partnership with CTM/DISK, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien and the Post-Media Lab of the Leuphana University Lüneburg.

The Vilém Flusser Residency Programme for Artistic Research supports projects and activities which are simultaneously conceptual and practice-based. The programme is geared towards the initiation of new research or to the further development of existing projects. It is offered in cooperation with the Flusser Archive at the University of Arts (UDK) in Berlin.

The transmediale archive comprises works, programme brochures, lectures, transmediale award winners and documentation from 28 years of festival activities. Apart from the content available on old websites and the extensive documentation already online since 2009, transmediale is presently working on the online distribution of older archive content.

transmediale is a project operating in the fields of media art, digital culture and new media – that said, it understands technology as being more than the digital world and of the cultural as being more than what emerges from within institutionalised fields of production. Accordingly, transmediale is a transdisciplinary platform, always searching for new avenues of artistic, academic, activist and everyday expressions. It is a project always on the look out for projects and persons who may help to navigate, reflect on and ultimately re-model the production of contemporary culture.

transmediale is a project by Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH in collaboration with Haus der Kulturen der Welt. It is funded as a cultural institution of excellence by Kulturstiftung des Bundes.