The opening ceremony discussions began with the idea of “utopia” as coined by Thomas Moore, specifying an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants live under perfect conditions. Some participants argued that technology has augmented this definition, especially with the use and dissemination of the Internet, where the concept of “place” has lost meaning as a fixed location. This discussion generated questions throughout the festival, such as how historical visions of the future, especially those of technology, have kept us questioning our fate.

One of the most heated conference debates occurred after Andreas Broegger’s talk “From Art as Software to Software as Art.” This presentation featured details of two influential art interventions from the 1970’s: Jack Burnham’s “Software” show at the Jewish Museum in NYC and the magazine “Radical Software.” Broegger’s aim was to show how a shift in attention has occurred away from simply taking art objects at face value and towards examining the processes and ideas they instill and execute. Arguments were vented that the 1970’s show was trying to appropriate a definition of the term “software” while today’s “software art” is more about utilizing and positioning the software as an art object unto itself. In this regard, the Radical Software magazine can be seen as distilling cultural processes into information processes as a type of software creation. I tend to think that today’s software art has an interest in not only what it represents as executable code, but also in how people use and experience it in their everyday lives. Since software was not a pervasive technology in the 70’s, this question of defining the term existed as artistic experiments and conceptual models of what the future of technology might hold. Today a glitchy network protocol can be called art, whereas the 1970’s birthed the idea that computational technology could be re-purposed for artistic interventions in the first place.

The award presentations for image, interaction, and software consisted of short talks by the nominated artists. In the image category, Julien Maire’s “DEMI-PAS” was a remarkable projection system featuring interchangeable slides, each with tiny motorized dioramas. Everyday, repetitive scenes were depicted, including a man washing his car or smoke blowing from a factory, but their intricacies were precise and beautiful. In the interactive category, Simon Schiessl’s “Haptic Opposition” won over the judges with a simple motorized LED text display that responded to user aggression by becoming more anxious and nervous during repeated interaction. I was a bit surprised that Schiessl seemed more impressed by the technology of the piece rather than its social potential for interface design. Finally, the software art presentation of Robert Luxemburg’s “The Conceptual Crisis of Private Property as a Crisis in Practice” was premised on the idea of a screen shot that, when run through a PHP script, would be transformed into the full text of Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.” Although the concept of decryption of proprietary file formats is not new (take DeCSS for example), the idea that one file could be masked within the binary data of another begins to get scary.

For a festival themed on questioning the future, there existed almost a fearful reluctance to discuss what might happen if we ever reach utopia. There might be bio-products in our food, computer-predicted life experiences, and organ superstores on every corner, but what will happen to society in general? Will a resistance form? Will technology eventually catch up with us and deter our fetishistic instincts? Forget living! Is utopia something worth dying for? Does anyone care? As the festival closed, a central question remained stuck in my mind: If creativity is our salvation, why does the dream of utopia always seem to cloud its potential? Most of the projects shown at Transmediale seemed to grapple with the idea that technology can produce beauty through simplicity. This was also evident with most of the invited speakers, who spoke of utopia within a defined context rather than masked jargon. Overall, the festival offered a taste of both questioning and embracing the road ahead, and it promises to be even more inspirational next year.