club transmediale.04
[FLY UTOPIA!]

Jan 30 - Feb 07
MAO - Maria am Ostbahhof

Curated by: Oliver Baurhenn, Jan Rohlf, Remco Schuurbiers and Marc Weiser
Guest-Curator: Meike Jansen.

club transmediale for the fith presents the state of the art of electronic music and related visual arts in a sound and club context in cooperation with the transmediale - international media art festival berlin.

club transmediale's main emphasis is the crossover: Increasingly stringent economic constraints and forced professionalism are a brake on potential crossover collaboration between clubs and the fields of visual arts, fashion, design and theory. The playful, ironic treatment of socio-cultural issues has yielded to a new sobriety, which, instead of the exploration of creative potentialities, focuses on economic competence. This situation There calls to take a stance, which enables to conceive the club as open space for a programmatic experimental artistic practice.

Spy Utopia! is the title of an artwork for CTM.04 and describes our primary issue: CTM and TM have chosen the common motto Fly Utopia! at a time when several events with a similar theme have already taken place. The question as to the significance of contemporary utopia seems at any rate to still be unanswered. Or maybe the question is thoroughly passé. Is Utopia a contemporary issue at all? Or should we simply call the Festival: Utopia Is Over!?

Spy Utopia! - in the sense of 'checking out the situation' - thus describes the methodology to approach utopian ideas in the various programme points of the festival. Further East, the continued focus on Eastern European electronic music and its potential to promote understanding beyond cultural borders, will bring us closer to an utopia hopefully no longer too distant, namely: European unification and the dismantling of distorted clichées, which are still too evident in the exchanges between East and West. Performing Sound, concerns representation of the human body in electronic music. This same topic is taken up to explore the situation of female producers in electronic music in the cooperation with the HTMlles Festival from Montréal. Free information exchange, possibilities of autonomous distribution of art work and the potential of collective projects are tackled in concrete, practical ways with this year's cooperations - for example with the Berlin radio project reboot.fm and with Share from New York.