# Transmediale09 Festival for art & digital culture Berlin / 28 Gen -> 1 Feb

theme transmediale.09: DEEP NORTH

28 January – 1 February 2009
House of World Cultures, Berlin

Looking beyond the evolving alarmist scenarios of environmental
catastrophe prevalent in the global warming debate, transmediale.09
shifts the focus of this challenge to the broader cultural, societal
and philosophical consequences that the collapse of the northern ice
barrier reveals. Are we about to reach another historically succinct
moment of unavoidable and revolutionary change, a point of no return
leading to an unforeseeable global transformation akin to the fall of
the Berlin Wall 20 years ago? Will it be a time in which we realise
that everything will be different, without knowing how everything will be different?

WEB ::  http://www.transmediale.de

In the search for DEEP NORTH, transmediale.09 seeks the paradoxical
and global consequences, the re-orientation, shifting of perspectives
and means to interact with the issues of cultural and technological
development, innovation and creative sustainability lurking below the
surface of climate change. DEEP NORTH becomes not a fixed location, but
a paradigm transforming loss into a complex state of being and cultural
development – an indicator of location becoming fused with global
introspection.

In the real and metaphorical breaking open of the both the North and
South polar zone's locked and inaccessible mysteries we discover both
new dangers and opportunities. Reinforcing the sense that the Earth
acts a truly global system of interrelated events where a shift in the
perception and attitudes towards cultural interdependencies become
critical, DEEP NORTH is a call to artists, media activists and cultural
practitioners to explore the roles that art and digital culture play in
defining new media strategies beyond the rhetoric of climate change.

DEEP NORTH focuses on the remote, silent … indeed, deep zones of
artistic and cultural sensibilities and processes of transformation
from the arctic to the desert, from the depths of network practice to
the remote constructs of scientific and technological systems. As our
sense of the natural environment vanishes to be replaced by models,
projections and technological mimicry, the need to fundamentally
transform cultural thinking by applying, adapting and exploring the
creative use of technology increases, thus critically affecting the
means of communication, interaction and perception… in the DEEP NORTH
of our global cultural awareness.