Author: Emma Skjelten Daasvatn.
During the last week of January, the Artsformation Consortium partners visited the Transmediale Festival as part of the Consortium summit of 2022. Present there were the Nordic Centre of Internet and Society´s Victor Renza, Christian Fieseler, and Peter Booth.
At the summit, the Consortium advanced in the goals of the project, planned for the next months´ activities, and presented their results to the External Executive Advisory Board. The project partners also had the chance to visit the opening of the 2022 Transmediale exhibition ´abandon all hope ye who enter here´ in Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
As can be understood by the name of the exhibition itself, ´abandon all hope ye who enter here´ was inspired by Dante´s inferno, and asks ´how can the technological hellscapes we are producing – and the futures they are making – be refused or rejected?´
By combining conjuring artifice and dark humour seen in light of today´s illusion of techno-solutism and financial fantasies, the exhibition provides the message of how the utopian promise of technological efficiency is losing its validity. The exhibition displays the artworks of nine artists and collectives working around the utopian fantasies and dangers of technology, thereby exploring the limits of refusal in a world that is computationally ordered and altered.
In other words, and as indicated on the introductory statement of the event´s webpage, the exhibition ‘materialises the strange realities and cruel attachments that are often obscured beneath the veneers of shiny, seductive interfaces`.
The exhibition is a project delivered by Transmediale, which is a partner of the Artsformation project, and is supported by the European Union within the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Artwork and image credit: Annex Entanglement 2021 Installation, photo by Luca Giradini under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license