decoder

Transmediale, Festival for Media Art and Digital Culture, is a guest in October in our series discussing the social significance of free cultural spaces. In 1988, it was founded as VideoFilmFest by Micky Kwella and the independent video production group MedienOperative to create a platform for electronic media productions as part of the Berlinale Forum. Today, transmediale is one of the world's most important events for art and digital culture. Over four decades, she built up a network of artists, researchers, and practitioners who work at the margins of dominant technology culture and maintain forms of exchange, knowledge production, and collective imagination. In Silent Green, a new neighborhood was created between Transmediale and Arsenal. The 40th edition, which opens in January, looks at transmedia as a counter-infrastructure, understood as a generative practice of building and dealing with the technological conditions of our present day.

DECODER: Sound maker F.M. grabs one of his tape recorders and records what goes on between music and fast food in the snack bars of the city of Hamburg. With a DECODER, he turns the shallow music on its back. As soon as these harrowing sounds circulate in the city, chaos breaks out. A sound maker is looking for an acoustic weapon. (Stefanie Schulte Strathaus)