Lecture Performance "An Engine Not A Camera" by Orit Halpern @ Transmediale at Akademie der Künste | February 4, 2023

An Engine Not A Camera

With Orit Halpern
Moderated by Ryan Bishop

transmediale 2023

https://2023.transmediale.de/en​​​​​​​

The 36th edition of transmediale takes place at Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, and across the city from 1 to 5 February. a model, a map, a fiction explores how scale reconfigures relations, politics, and affects. Alongside the festival, transmediale presents the free citywide exhibition Out of Scale distributed and embedded within the networks and infrastructures of Berlin.

transmediale festival opens with an evening of exhibition, performance, and music and is followed by four days of discussion, artistic interventions, workshops, and film screenings. The evening programme in collaboration with partner CTM Festival offers four nights of music, concerts, and performance.

Alongside the main festival, transmediale presents the free citywide exhibition Out of Scale. Distributed and embedded across eBay Kleinanzeigen, Tempelhofer Feld, transmediale warehouse, and Berlin’s Spätis (local shops) and U-Bahn, the exhibition challenges the optimised image of the city generated by algorithmic processes.

a model, a map, a fiction

From the spatial to the temporal, the intimate to the geopolitical – scale and its many technological manifestations have long been means for measuring and organising. As machine learning and automated tools become common, the scaling of images and representations fabricates and circulates realities. The politics of scaling contests established hierarchies of information by favouring certain representations over others. 

Calculation and its many biases make the world computable, yet it pushes and pulls our affections and politics through infrastructures and logistics, flattening us into tokenized transactions along the way. These operations assemble new unstable arrangements of relations, politics, and feelings, scaling them out of sync, and leaving multiple mis/representations at the surface of screens. As these many fragile realities risk further degradation and collapse, what role can scale play in altering what is mapped and measured? 

The 2023 transmediale festival will explore the scalar politics and tactics at stake, questioning how the instrumentalisation and affect of scale can be challenged.