This year marked the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group’s first collaboration with the transmediale festival in Berlin, part of an extended collaboration between transmediale and Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), which is planned to continue with future iterations of the festival.
transmediale is an annual festival that brings together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide.
CIIP co-directors Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina, Kwame Phillips, and Megen de Bruin-Molé coordinated a series of three events at the festival, which ran from 29 January through 2 February 2025. These events corresponded to the festival theme of ‘(near) near but – far’, expanding on this theme through the lens of ‘haunting/haunted’. How do we develop a necropolitics of resistance in this political climate, saturated by crisis real and fabricated, persevering in conditions that are unthinkable, being sucked / plunged into something we might conceptualise as ‘cybergothic’ (Van Elferen 2009, Konior 2020, Anikina 2024)? How do we live in proximity to this horror that is both palpable and incorporeal, the toll that it takes, still persisting and working despite the increasing weight?
Haunting, writes Avery F. Gordon, ‘is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done […] precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done’ (2008, p. xvi). It also implies the kind of haunted, occult space described by Franz Fanon, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, or Katherine McKittrick; potential places of redemptive, transformative simultaneity, where the haunting presence and the haunted present are both proximate and synergistic.
In the half-day ‘Structures of Haunting’ workshop, a group of 25 participants reflected on ways in which the present is haunted by past(s) and futures. What are the structures and infrastructures that scaffold this haunting, and bring it close both temporally and spatially? To explore this question, a group of seven artists and researchers hosted by Winchester School of Art engaged in a series of divination and séance attempts, seeing these as practices of enactment in the present, rather than of predicting ‘the future’ or uncovering ’the past’. Participants joined the workshop both online, and in the basement of a former crematorium in silent green.
Combining sound (a performative sound piece by Liz Gre), voice (a performative eulogy by Kwame Phillips), movement (a dance performance by Rebecca Pokua Korang), and intervention (a sonic and gestural call and response by SA Smythe), ‘Echoes of Care’ was a collaborative multidisciplinary performance exploring the theme of haunting and Black ways of care, and exploring the body as a vehicle for epiginetic memory of carelessness and carefulness. Playing physically with the concept of closeness (of those performing) and proximity (to the audience who remain peripheral), the performance considered the sound of careFULness and careLESSness and how that sound might echo through our bones, memories, and beyond.
On the last day of the festival the CIIP team gathered for Sasha Anikina’s lecture-performance ‘On the Cybergothic’, a short audiovisual interrogation of the politics of substitution. While substitution of politics is a general condition (“Having looked for politics in order to avoid it, we move next to each other, so we can be beside ourselves”, say Moten and Harney in the Undercommons), the politics of substitution is one of its digital-born symptoms. As we are offered neoliberal “politics” as a substitute, our digital shadows grow into doppelgängers, substitutes of ourselves in the eyes of larger infrastructures. From digital twins and grief bots to smart home as dual-use tech, the worlds of the cybergothic violence are never too far. How far does the substitution stretch? What haunts our online spaces? What ways of being, mourning and existing online can we embody?
This lecture-performance was followed by a discussion and meditation on the theme of haunting/haunted between Sasha, Kwame, and Megen, in which they looked back over the events of the festival. They also acknowledged the present absence of their fellow co-director Stephen Cornford, who was not able to attend the festival, but who will be on a residency at ZK/U | Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in March/April 2025 to work on a film about carbon accounting and its visualisations in forestry.
Other CIIP members and colleagues from WSA were also featured at the festival, including a screening and conversation with artists Bhenji Ra and Tati au Miel chaired by Liz Gre, and several events and screenings related to Ryan Bishop and Jussi Parikka’s WIND project.