transmediale.10: FUTURITY NOW!

In 2010, the future no longer felt like a distant horizon. The year long imagined by twentieth-century culture as a moment of technological arrival had become the present, and the social, political and economic systems around it were unstable. transmediale.10: FUTURITY NOW! took this condition as its starting point. The festival asked not what the future had in store for us, but what we had in store for the future.

Honor Harger was guest curator of transmediale.10, the festival for art and digital culture held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The programme gathered artists, writers, researchers, critics and activists to reconsider inherited ideas of progress, media culture and time. Its theme, FUTURITY NOW!, examined the moment when older images of tomorrow had become inadequate, and when new templates for future-making needed to be imagined.

As part of the festival, Honor curated Future Obscura, an exhibition exploring futurity through the lens of image-making. Taking the camera obscura as a point of departure, the exhibition brought together works that used light, projection, moving-image technologies, tape, film and data storage to disturb ordinary ideas of memory and temporality. The artists in the exhibition were Ryoji Ikeda, Zilvinas Kempinas, Gebhard Sengmüller, Julius von Bismarck, Julien Maire, Yvette Mattern, Julian Oliver, TeZ, Ken Rinaldo, Alice Micelli, Adam Somlai-Fischer, Usman Haque and Bengt Sjölen.

The wider festival also included Future Observatory, a conference with 22 speakers and keynotes by Bruce Sterling, Conrad Wolfram, Richard Barbrook and Siegfried Zielinski. Its Futurity Long Conversation was a relay of one-to-one discussions developed in collaboration with Artangel and the Longplayer Trust. Alongside this, the performance programme brought concerts, audiovisual works and live events into the festival, including performances by Charlemagne Palestine, Ryoji Ikeda, artificiel, Jürgen Reble, Thomas Köner, Atom_TM, FM3_Zhang and Feng Mengbo.