Heart of the festival communication: the counter with certified program-sheets/documents
transmediale face value
Festival identity, Artdirection and Design. With: Seb Holl-Trieu, Simon Schindele.
Tag: Screenshot
Do you question the authenticity of screenshots? The screenshot, especially the screenshot made with a mobile phone, is a new(er) media format which carries an unique aura. It makes a documention of a viewed moment – and further: it captures time, phone reception, interface design etc. This combination of data makes it quite credible. Taking screenshots is a daily (work)routine, which makes it even more interesting as startingpoint of the face value story...
Another important design element is our genuine hologram, which carries different levels of references. Based on standardized hologramm-design components it secures above all: transmediale 2018 is transmediale 2018 is transmediale 2018. Read more across this page.
the website is a collection screenshots. the design stays very minimal.
zoom in and out feature
All program related information of the festival was printed on transmediale's own A4 face value stationery, which carried also the face value hologram. We kept the format of the screenshot as element for our communication, captured the whole program of the (mobile) website, and printed the files/pngs on the special paper. Instead of printing a full festival program brochure we decided this year to give the visitors only single-event information sheets, directly at the new main info counter.
Therefore the events were numbered on the webpage/schedule, so it got easy to order the sheets you really wanted to collect. All sheets were printed directly at HKW: we could save more than 30% paper with the "print on demand" concept plus: communicate with the audience about their festival stay: face value.
The xerox printer was close to the info counter. Single-event sheets got printed (more or less) on demand.
For owners of transmediale festival passes we designed the blue folder to collect all sheets. It carried also more information and the overview schedule:
transmediale journal #1 was published within the festival. It collects essays which are released on the website and support the thematic framework of face value. More information/pdf: here
Things are what they are—but could they be different?
transmediale 2018 face value aims to take stock of current affairs, to recognize things for what they are before saying how they could be different. It is an attempt to probe the values, as well as the processes of value creation, that have contributed to our present moment of extreme political, economic, and cultural divides. The festival seeks possible new ways of resisting and deconstructing the alarming development of a digital populism, the radicalization of net culture and the new culture wars.
“Taking things at face value” seems to have become the norm of public discourse amidst today’s reactionary and algorithmically guided communication practices. transmediale wants to challenge this impulse to judge things by their immediate appearance and instead look at less visible issues, which run deep across all sectors of society. These include power relations rarely discussed at digital culture events, such as contemporary imbalances of class, gender, and race, which are also being built into technological systems. In fact, rather than providing an emancipatory alternative, (post-)digital culture today seems to support hate-mongering, racist and neo-colonial powers.This, however, should not be a reason to lament a mythical past, back in which, supposedly, the internet was free and digital creativity unbound. Rather, there is a need to embrace both unsettling and uniting cultural practices, as well as daring speculative thinking, to promote auto-criticality and an awareness that nothing is ever as simple as its surface suggests. Similarly, cultural events like transmediale are made up of different political imaginaries and communities that are simultaneously resistant and complicit to the developments one so urgently needs to oppose.
With these challenges and paradoxes of the present moment in mind, how can artists, cultural workers, and speculative theorists respond to the current politics of taking things at face value and, at the same time, face their own values? How does one name biases and exploitative mechanisms for what they are, in order to formulate new ways to resist, deconstruct or move beyond them?
As usual, the program takes on a variety of curatorial formats and modes of knowledge exchange, which are united in a twofold approach of interrogating value and values, looking at cultural shifts against the background of economization and changing value sets. The curatorial approach is one of transversal combination of formats and participants across the whole program.
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