Transmediale began in 1988 as a video festival featuring short films, and soon expanded the theme to deal with trends in international media arts. Since 2002, the content has included music and media arts, and from next year, the festival is set to grow further in both scale and content. This year could be seen as a marking point in this sense.

Actually, there were some areas that seemed a little uncertain, but just like the city of Berlin, these new developments produce a certain power and energy, reflected in the optimistically childish title, “Fly Utopia!”.

Hausder Kulturender Welt

As far as the content of the festival goes, there are the permanent exhibitions, awards, screenings, workshops, performances, etc. On top of this, work spaces have been set up where artists constantly gather to work, experiment, or meet other artists. The whole place has been structured to encourage exchange.

Julien Maire “Demi-Pas”

Of the works that I saw, French artist Julien Maire‘s “Demi-Pas” caught my eye especially. What looks to be a homemade projector beams out slide images fitted with special apparatus to produce a cinematographic short movie. The story simply follows the day in the life of a man, but the direction using this projector brings out a mysterious sense of the world. By arranging the slides in layers, the images gain depth and depending on the focus, parts of images can appear or disappear, giving the illusion of a surreal dreamlike world, enforced by other non-image material which Maire uses to produce real-time phenomena. What seems to be at first very analogue is in fact full of technology, resulting in a short film brimming with ideas.

Zhou Hongxiang “The Red Flag Flies”

Moving on to “The Red Flag Flies” by Chinese artist Zhou Hongxiang, part of the permanent exhibition and the Awards. The content was too deep to understand completely, but the energy from the images and sound was so powerful that not even that could take anything away from it. The colourful images were impressive.

“Competition8_urban fibre”

“Competition8_urban fibre” is a competition between 8 short films based on the landscape of today’s cities. Germany’s Patrick Palucki‘s “Today Starts on Page 23” and Belgium’s Anouk de Clercq, Joris Cool, and Anton Aeki’s “Building” stood out.

Franz Höfner “Utrechter Hutte”

However, the most impressive was “Utrechter Hutte” by Germany’s Franz Höfner. With the camera set at a fixed angle in a room, the video displays the remaking of a furniture unit into a real hut within the room. Technically it only involves the fast-fowarding of the filmed process, but the imagery of a house taking shape inside a room takes everyone by surprise.