ever elusive
2 Feb - 5 Mar 2017
Curators: Kristoffer Gansing
Daphne Dragona (conference)
Florian Wüst (film and video)
Transmediale Festival
HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Berlin, Germany



2 February 2017 the three-day festival program opens at Haus der Kulturen der Welt within the scope of ever elusive. The festival, encompassing a conference and screening program, workshops and performances, takes place from 3 to 5 February 2017. 

Associated Events

Material Agents with Kain Karawahn, Dorine van Meel, Lisa Tan, HKW, Berlin, Feb 5, 2017 (screening)

In the 1960s, Stan Vanderbeek worked at Bell Labs (as did Lillian Schwartz, whose early films open the ever elusive film and video program) on a series of experimental computer animations with Ken Knowlton. His Poemfields exploited the possibilities computers offered to produce forms that constantly shift between image and text, code and language, and transfer them to film: concrete poetry of the digital. The artistic process progresses through many different material states, some of which are hidden, thus anticipating the increasing complexity of a world shaped by electronic systems. Using Vanderbeek’s work as a departure point, Material Agents combines stories of the present and future that examine the conditions of an inclusive concept of subjectivity, and at the same time the potentials of political resistance and economic empowerment in neoliberalism.