In an age where digital systems orchestrate our longing for closeness – whether it’s through shared ASMR sensations, children bonding over mimicking Alexa, or internet subcultures rallying around e-girls selling bathwater – transmediale’s latest edition, (near) near but – far, explored how algorithms shape intimacy while simultaneously driving us apart in the process. By examining these “performances of proximity”, the festival posed questions on how technology can nurture deeper, more adaptive connections, rather than simply replacing human bonds with machine-driven interactions.
Let us take you on a trip to Berlin. Between January 29th – February 2nd, Transmediale 2025 marked the 38th edition of Berlin’s renowned festival exploring the intersections of art, culture, and digital technologies. Held at the iconic Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), this year’s programme continued to push the boundaries of creative innovation and critical discourse, bringing together artists, scholars, and technologists from around the globe to reflect on the rapidly evolving digital landscape. From speculative installations to thought-provoking panels, each event prompted visitors to rethink their relationship with technology – challenging conventional ideas of progress while exposing the social, political, and ecological dimensions of digital culture. Whether through interactive exhibits, performances, or engaging debates on AI ethics, surveillance, and data colonialism, transmediale 2025 offered a vibrant space of discovery and dialogue. As Berlin buzzed with interdisciplinary synergy, attendees left with fresh insights on how to navigate and shape our shared digital future.
Mapping social, economic, and political contexts
Led by curators Ben Evans James and Elise Misao Hunchuck, this year’s transmediale introduced a renewed approach, bringing together a diverse group of artists and researchers as programmers while building on long-standing collaborations. As such, the festival’s public opening took place on January 30 at silent green Kulturquartier, followed by three days of lectures, conversations, screenings, and performances at HKW. Prior to the official launch, two days of workshops at the silent green and the annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture held at the Embassy of Canada set the stage for critical debates on how our devices and digital platforms blur the lines between connection and disconnection – bringing us into unsettlingly close yet distant relationships.
A dynamic programme of provocative lectures, performances, and screenings later took centre stage at HKW, offering an expansive view of how technology, archives, dance, and sound intersect to shape our understanding of the world. Over multiple days, speakers and artists grappled with questions of power, proximity, and reality –- examining how the digital age complicates the boundaries between knowing and unknowing, belief and disbelief, and memory and forgetting. Through these discussions, the festival illuminated both the humanity and inhumanity embedded within contemporary technological and cultural practices.
GPS for the Brain: Cognitive Mapping Revisited, the presentation by Laura Kurgan, a South African architect and an associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), set a dynamic tone for the event. Drawing inspiration from Fredric Jameson’s idea of cognitive mapping, she argued that every map – whether a smartphone navigation tool or a sophisticated data visualisation – reflects the social, economic, and political contexts in which it was created. Through the presentation, Kurgan also pointed out how neural networks, data extraction processes, and AI algorithms influence our perception of movement and space.
Whether these algorithms direct rideshare drivers or military drones, they have very real effects on people’s lives and freedoms. Kurgan brought attention to the importance of “getting lost” as both a metaphor and a practice – in the same way that losing our way on a walk can reveal hidden corners of a city, acknowledging the limitations of data-driven interpretations can uncover biases and omissions. Kurgan’s conversation with Jussi Parikka, a Finnish new media theorist and scholar, further amplified the urgency of critically examining cartographic tools that now extend beyond paper, permeating satellites, servers, and the algorithmic pathways that shape global flows of information. Though we may rarely think of mapping as political, Kurgan emphasised that every choice about what appears on – or is excluded from – a map is rooted in systems of power.
Passive proximities and the choreographed closeness: authenticity and intimacy in the digital age
A session called Passive Proximities and the Choreographed Closeness showcased the works of the artists – Maud Craigie, Alice Lenay, and 2girls1comp (Marco De Mutiis and Alexandra Pfammatter). Maud Craigie opened by illustrating how authenticity can be choreographed, turning to playful examples such as Betty Crocker’s cake mixes – which initially failed to capture consumers’ loyalty until manufacturers instructed them to add a fresh egg to their mix, creating the illusion of a homemade batter. From these seemingly benign domestic examples, Craigie explored the cultural obsession with “authentic” experiences, spanning from branding to the narratives we construct about ourselves.
2girls1comp added to this narrative by diving into their “counter-play” mod of Grand Theft Auto V, transforming the digital environment into a canvas for writing messages across the landscape. Their intervention suggested that open-world games, often dominated by corporate storytelling and algorithmically generated content, can be reclaimed by users to foster new forms of dialogue and community, thereby challenging the passive nature of mass entertainment. Alice Lenay then shifted the conversation to the psychological effects of digital intimacy by introducing the concept of “the twisties”. Through this, she bridges the visceral, physically disorienting experience of gymnasts mid-tumble with the psychological disorientation we feel when the screens we rely on for proximity – through video calls, social media feeds, even dating apps – paradoxically amplify our sense of distance.
Together, these three presentations painted a picture of how consumerist culture, game worlds, and our own bodies are choreographed into patterns of seeing and believing – patterns that can be disrupted through critical reflection and playful subversion.
Defining our lives in the digital age
The rich transmedia programme took its audiences on a journey through time, space, and the digital. The lecture of Ali Akbar Mehta, artist, curator, researcher, and writer, Living in ‘Archival Time’, or at the End of Narrative(s), delved into the politics of knowledge, memory, and data. Drawing from his doctoral research at Aalto University, Mehta highlighted the evolution of archives, which are no longer static, dusty repositories of documents. In an era where almost every click, biometric record, and social media post is logged, archives have instead taken on the form of fluid systems expanding daily with user interactions and algorithmic sorting. Far from neutral, these data-driven environments are shaped by structural, self-reinforcing human biases.
As these digital records grow increasingly pervasive, the boundaries between lived experience and its documentation continue to blur. Mehta pointed to “lifelogs” – the comprehensive digital footprints that record everything from daily commutes to sleeping patterns – as an example, arguing that the relentless tracking of daily life fragments time and disrupts traditional storytelling structures. While archives once played a role in constructing historical memory, they now can shape collective perceptions in real time. However Mehta’s lecture was not without hope: he proposed that by acknowledging the performative nature of archives and recognising the political forces at work, archives could instead become ethical spaces where communities co-create and continually reinterpret their histories, rather than merely preserving and replicating dominant narratives.
We Are Closer to Them Than Their Jugular Vein: The Metaphysics of Distance and Proximity in a Fictional World, a talk by Federico Campagna, an Italian philosopher and writer based in London, extended discussions on meaning-making by proposing that reality itself is a construct mediated by language, imagination, and belief. Drawing on philosophy and spirituality, he explored how fictional narratives – religious texts, cultural myths, political ideologies – not only influence our thinking but also define how we exist in the world. Campagna argued that too little belief leads to existential stagnation, leaving one drifting aimlessly in a vacuum of scepticism. An excess of belief, however, crystallises into dogma, shutting us off from alternative perspectives.
Campagna’s reflections on contemporary technology – particularly how social media and digital networks amplify ideological echo chambers – felt especially relevant. By underscoring that proximity is as much a mental construct as a physical one, he suggested that the distances we perceive – whether political or personal – are often illusions strengthened by the narratives we accept. If reality is indeed fiction, the ethical challenge lies in crafting narratives that expand, rather than constrain, our ability to relate to one another.
Constructing worlds through creative acts
Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon, a film by Bhenji Ra, a transdisciplinary artist currently based on Gadigal land, Eora Nation, provided a shift in register, exploring cultural memory through ritual, dance, and myth. In collaboration with her teacher and co-creator Sitti Airia Sangkula Askalani-Obeso (also known as Amal), Ra immersed herself in Pangalay, a traditional dance from the Sulu Archipelago. Centring on the mythical Biraddali – a celestial being embodying fluidity and transformation – Ra framed dance as a bridge across temporal and cultural gaps. The work demonstrated how our bodies carry archives of precolonial practices, even when fractured by colonial violence and displacement.
In a post-screening discussion with composer Tati au Miel and musician Liz Gre, Ra expanded on the role of embodied knowledge. As the artists described encountering archival footage of Sulu women performing Pangalay, a palpable sense of both discovery and mourning emerged. It was a discovery of cultural histories that survive through bodily memory, but a mourning of traditions disrupted by colonial powers. By reading the Biraddali as a trans-nonhuman presence, Ra highlighted how dance transcends rigid binaries of gender and culture, and how it dissolves the boundary between the human and the mythic.
In their film Lumi, artists Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka reframed photography and AI as intertwined forces that actively process the environment rather than passively recording it. Using historical photographic datasets to train synthetic intelligence, they experimented with time by reversing images to envision an inverted chronology. Their work examined how images – once considered definitive, objective records – have instead become ever-shifting and fluid. By training machines to generate future landscapes based on old photographs, the artists highlighted the ways narratives of place and time are actively constructed rather than simply documented.
The film’s poetic montage invited viewers to see images as dynamic entities – constantly computed, refracted, and redeployed. This fluidity extended to broader concerns of remote sensing, climate modelling, and cartographic surveillance raising questions about how these technologies reshape ecological awareness at a time when climate change demands both urgency and accuracy. Lumi served as a reminder that the archives of the past can easily become algorithms of the future, carrying forward both hopes and prejudices we are not even aware of.
Sonic archiving and textures
Working under his solo alias Hulubalang, Gabber Modus Operandi’s Kasimyn performed Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal using fractured beats, dense soundscapes, and layered samples to evoke a haunting sense of remembrance. Through his work, he addressed a different kind of archival engagement – one rooted not in formal records but in the echoes of war, trauma, and suppressed histories. Centred on the notion of the tumbal (sacrifice), the performance wove together elements of Indonesia’s wartime past, amplifying the voices of individuals and communities often neglected by official histories. The result was both jarring and meditative, a powerful demonstration of how sound can summon collective grief and resilience, making forgotten voices reverberate through the present.
Closing out the series, ZULI’s Lambda was an electrifying audio-visual odyssey by the Cairo-based producer and DJ. Known for pushing sonic boundaries, ZULI built a constantly evolving landscape of guttural drones, fragmented vocals, and pulverised strings. The accompanying visuals, created by Tomasz Skibicki and Sander Houtkruijer, along with Andre Vanderwert’s lighting design, transformed the performance space into a pulsating field of energy. Much like Campagna’s examination of the fictional nature of reality, ZULI’s set blurred the line between chaos and order, suggesting that unpredictability can be a powerful creative force. His sonic textures defied conventional rhythmic patterns, creating moments where repetition shifted to distortion, and distortion dissolved into an almost meditative hush. This rejection of a stable, comforting pattern echoed the festival’s broader themes – the ongoing negotiation and flux between technology, archives, and the body.
All these diverse presentations were tied together by a shared preoccupation with how we construct the worlds we inhabit – whether through maps, archives, myths, algorithms, or sonic experiences. Each speaker and performer emphasised that the frameworks we use to orient ourselves – cognitive maps, choreographed intimacies, data-driven realities – are never apolitical or purely utilitarian. Instead, they are shaped by cultural values, power dynamics, and ethical choices.
From Hulubalang’s confrontation with historical erasures and Mehta’s reimagining of archives to Bhenji Ra’s revival of mythic genealogies, each piece offered a glimpse into how creative acts can expose and challenge the narratives we take for granted. The overarching message was that, even in a world dizzy with digital acceleration, we retain the ability – and perhaps the responsibility – to reshape our understanding of place, memory, and possibility. The festival’s final message was an invitation to engage critically, imaginatively, and ethically with the technologies, stories, and performances that continually push us toward new horizons.
