transmediale 2013 is happy to announce a preview of the participant highlights: for our one Pluto day (Jan 29th to Feb 3rd) 2013 festival program.

Stay tuned for our official programme outline with more specificity to dates and times.

In the early hours of Pluto, during our opening night, we welcome astronomer Michael Brown “The Guy Who Killed Pluto” (us) to engage in a planetary revote, followed by performances and works by People Like Us (uk), Carsten Nicolai (de), goto80 (se), Raquel Meyers (es), Jacob Sikker Remin (dk) and Benjamin Gaulon (fr/ie). Addressing the question of why classifications matter, is the 2013 McLuhan lecture by world renowned philosopher Ian Hacking (ca).

Throughout the Pluto day activities will unfold following the threads of Users, Networks, Paper, and Desire.

The film and video programme comprises of 48 film works and features 13 in person guests, including Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price (uk), People Like Us (uk), Eija-Liisa Ahtila (fi), John Smith (uk), and Dennis Adams (us) with his recent work Malraux' s Shoes.

Theorists, researchers and renegade thinkers will collide in the abundant conference programme that often takes a performative approach incorporating artistic interventions. Net culture pioneers and writers informed by computation will question ‘What Is the User?” in a panel with Olia Lialina (ru), Pär Thörn (se), and Cornelia Sollfrank(de/uk). Preoccupied with “uncreative writing”, American poet and founding editor of UbuWeb Kenneth Goldsmith (us), will be among the highlights in the Paper thread. The Networks thread will take on physical life in the form of Octo, the official Miscommunication platform of transmediale 2013 and social network parody sculpture, mimicking the Rohrpost mail system with support by Telekommunisten and raumlaborberlin, while panels such as Disrupting the Bureaucracy: Rethinking Social Networks, Mail Art in the GDR, and a keynote by Geert Lovink (nl) will extend the discussions. Desire highlights include the Spam and Porn panel with Stewart Home (uk), Finn Brunton (us), Rose White (us) and moderated by Gaia Novati (it/de). Sunday will offer a performative lecture by Sandy Stone (us) moderated by Francesco Warbear Macarone Palmieri and an unconventional theater piece by Diane Torr (uk), all advocates of gender-defying classifications since the 1970’s.

Other performances will include a retro-futuristic campfire experience by Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez (br) called Coded Narratives with guest musician A Guy Called Gerald (uk), Boris Hegenbart's project Instrumentarium II feat. Felix Kubin (de).

Workshops will include The Post Digital Print Lab with Florian Cramer (de), Alessandro Ludovico (it), and Simon Worthington (uk), and E-Waste initiated by Benjamin Gaulon (fr/ie) & Lourens Rozema, also featuring Karl Klomp (nl), Gijs Gieskes (nl), Tom Verbruggen (nl).

The shows in the The Miseducation of Anya Major framework will be an investigation into unruly forms of knowledge, learning, and education in relation to contemporary media. The three part exhibition includes the group exhibition Tools of Distorted Creativity, the solo show Imaging with Machine Processes: The Generative Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan, and an artistic response to the recently published book Evil Media: Evil Media Distribution Centre by YoHa (uk).

Moving into the night of the Pluto 24hr cycle, we invite you for an evening with legendary filmmaker and writer Alejandro Jodorowsky (cl) who will discuss his epic sci-fi comics oeuvre L’Incal, originally conceived with the artist Moebius in the late 1970’s. The conversation with Jodorowsky will be followed by a sci-fi and Jodoverse tinged performance double-bill from Demdike Stare and Gatekeeper.