This year marked my first collaboration with the transmediale festival in Berlin, as part of an extended collaboration between transmediale and Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), where I work.
The annual festival brings together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide.
My contribution to the festival came in the form of the half-day ‘Structures of Haunting’ workshop, in which a group of 25 participants reflected on ways in which the present is haunted by past(s) and futures. What are the structures and infrastructures that scaffold this haunting, and bring it close both temporally and spatially? To explore this question, a group of seven artists and researchers hosted by Winchester School of Art engaged in a series of divination and séance attempts, seeing these as practices of enactment in the present, rather than of predicting ‘the future’ or uncovering ’the past’. Participants joined the workshop both online, and in the basement of a former crematorium in silent green.
As I gear up for a new semester of teaching, I’m revising and looking back over materials from last year (in truth much less than a year due to a COVID-delayed start to teaching).