Questioning the way we reconstruct reality from our sensory perceptions, the exhibition presented by TAG at Club Transmediale 2010 displayed works employing different strategies to produce and reveal spurious conclusions in our cognitive apparatus. Optical nerves were fiddled with further by Zilvinas Kempinas’s White Noise exhibited at the House of World Cultures.

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At the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin canadian artist duo The User exhibited the first two installations of a series called Coincidence Engines.  Tributing Gyorgy Ligeti for his use of metronomes in Poeme Symphonique the artists explore themes such as regimentation, multiplicity, (im)perfection and entropy.

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In his lecture entitled “Sonic Interaction Design” Chris Salter talked about designing interfaces to shape the sounds of everyday objects and environments. At the exhibition Esquisses at the Substitute gallery we found a couple of related projects from students of the Art Academy in Bern.

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During Club Transmediale’s lecture program Robert Henke and Takuro Mizuta Lippit talked about making hardware and software musical instruments. The concepts they discussed were explored further during a set of performances, the core of these beeing the “extended eclectics” night at WMF curated by STEIM.

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It’s a cold sunday afternoon and the Tiergarten is covered in snow. People start gathering around the Siegessaule shortly before three o’clock, kicking their feet and blowing in their closed fists. Complicit smiles are exchanged while a feeling of curiosity and expectation develops. A child starts honking a toy horn, a passing car answers, attention rises but it’s a false start. I notice a number of people with different kinds of hand held recorders and microphones. There is no need to hide the recording gear at this particular concert. Staalplaat Soundsystem and both members of Pansonic have attracted this audience here, announcing a unique performance. Thirty cars are going to dance a coreography around the Siegessaule with their horns remotely triggered by the artists.  As the program notes read, the aim of the project is to test the capacity of artistic compositions to confront the “energy and physical impact of the noise levels in effect within the urban environment”.

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Attending this year’s edition of Berlin’s media art festival was a very rewarding experience, which made up nicely for the dissapointments of Transmediale 2009.

Between conferences, lectures, workshops, exhibitions and performances we had our schedule filled tight for a whole week. As the title Overlap of the partner event Club Transmediale suggested, there was much overlapping in the time table, so we missed quite a few of the highlights.  However, as might be expected, some of the most interesting things to be seen were in the peripheral areas of the program. We have gathered our documentation in the following articles, which we hope might be of interest for those who didin’t make it in person either to the festival or to the various times and places covered here.

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