This “reader” has been conceived and developed by Transmediale festival in Berlin – in occasion of its 30th anniversary – in collaboration with the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and published by Transmediale and the Sternberg Press, with a design specially realized by the Laboratory of Manuel Bürger (Stefanie Ackermann, Manuel Bürger).
“Across & Beyond” gathers contributions and essays by international theorists and media artists, such as: Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, Jamie Allen and David Gauthier, Clemens Apprich and Ned Rossiter, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Benjamin Bratton, Florian Cramer, Dieter Daniels, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Daphne Dragona, Keller Easterling, Olga Goriunova, Louis Henderson, Geraldine Juarez, Olia Lialina, Alessandro Ludovico, Rosa Menkman, Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev, Erica Scourti, Cornelia Sollfrank, Telekommunisten (Baruch Gottlieb and Dmytri Kleiner), Tiziana Terranova, YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji).
This collection of essays and texts has been edited by Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing, Jussi Parikka & Elvia Wilk. The originality of this text is the fact that it is not simply a sort of festival-catalogue, but rather a further theoretical exploration of themes reflected in the last festival edition. Three are the main sections of this book: Imaginaries, Interventions and Ecologies; each of them comes with a short introduction text and the articles are presented in different formats.
The aim of “Across & Beyond” is to provide the audience with a critical approach to contemporary questions and challenges affecting various human domains, from the social to the cultural, in particular within the paradigm shift we are currently living, going toward a post-digital (and post-human?) era.
As per the editors’ words, the Transmediale reader: “covers the response of media art and theory to these changes, more specifically drawing on media activism, media archaeology, critical media processes, and (post-)anthropocentric perspectives, offering various and complementary strategies for engaging these provocative contemporary concerns”.
The conceptual ‘passage’ from analog to digital has certainly raised many questions among theorists and a new landscape for media art and culture is currently reshaping itself day by day, partly because of the introduction of new technologies but also because of the raising of cross disciplinary practices and intersectional zones, a very fertile ground for new media arts.
The converging point of theory, art and technology is the starting point of this transversal investigation journey through the so called “post-digital landscape”, from the critical point of view of media theory, which is the focal lens enabling us to conceptualize and fully understand new artistic practices, technology usages and field-based works.
A must-have tool for professionals and a valuable companion for people interested in ongoing academic debates and further analysis of the contemporary media art and digital culture issues and challenges.