It is not unknown for academics to reference popular culture in their keynotes, but the lyrics and the themes of the new Beyonce video ‘Formation’, surveillance, police violence and climate change seemed to particularly resound throughout the closing keynote of the latest edition of Berlin’s Transmediale Festival and indeed in the excellent video selection at CTM’s New Geographies exhibition, Seismographic Sounds- Visions of a New World, which continues after the festival until the end of March.
The final keynote of the talk-based Transmediale festival, by artist Hito Steyerl (who represented Germany in the 2015 Venice Biennale) and academic Nicolas Mirzoeff summed up all the modern ‘anxieties’ covered by the Transmediale ‘Conversation Piece’ from drone strikes, random infrastructural violence via climate racism and Hurricane Katrina, as illustrated in the Beyonce video made for the Superbowl. Steyerl cleverly undermined any illusion of modern remote warfare being at all rational by quoting from the Snowden files of a secret operative’s desperation on viewing the ‘sea of data’ from the internet and the subsequent ‘apophenia’ (seeing faces and patterns in things that are not there) that perhaps caused the recent terrible episode of the home of an entirely innocent civilian family being wiped out by a drone strike while watching the news on TV in Gaza.
‘If the surface of Miku’s body is comparable to visible and public collective desire, could it be that we find the dark web beyond the layers of her skirt?’ Well perhaps. A lot noise and hype surrounded the performance by the first collaboratively constructed cyber celebrity, Hatsune Miku in Transmediale and CTM’s collaboration ‘Still Be Here’. Maybe it was because I arrived at the performance directly from the CTM appearance of the extraordinary 80- something sound artist, Pauline Oliveros, who casually strapped on an accordion and proceeded to amaze an audience collectively a quarter of her age (she was also the first artist to bounce signals off the moon, in the 60’s) I was distinctly underwhelmed by the holographic performance of Miku, singing about ‘Mcluhan Angelism’ , academic jargon mixed with cute slogans like ‘Alone Is Fun’. Conceived by artist Mari Matsutoya, ‘Still be here” presents Miku as ‘the crystallization of collective desires’ in which the ‘audience comes to the uncanny realization that Miku is simply an empty vessel onto which we project our own fantasies’. Well yes, but I am not sure I needed to sit through this lengthy conceit to find this out.
The one thing Berlin does really well is noise music and we were not disappointed at the last performance of the festival by The Anarchivists, with legendary Einsturzende Newbaten members FM Einheit and Andrew Unruh hitting objects violently, smashing things up generally overlaid with ‘original sounds from the May First festivities in Kreuzberg and the clattering of Heiner Muller’s typewriter in his flat in East Berlin’. Berlin post-RAF, old school yes, but direct from the heartbeat of what is still the the most energised city, in terms of music and art, in Europe.
