[photo: tjmk75]

Last night the fine folks at Interaccess provided me with the opportunity to see Andreas Broeckmann present some work from last year's edition of Transmediale festival. Broeckmann has stepped away from directing the festival after having headed the venture for the last seven years. Having a personal interest in the promotion of digital art as well as electronic music I was really keen on hearing Broeckmann's perspective on the intersection of these two spheres as well as commentary on the European festival scene in general.

Transmediale emerged from the video art scene in Berlin in the late 1980s. The earliest incarnation of the festival (named VideoFest) was an offshoot of the established Berlinale festival. The break occurred due to the marginalization of video in favour of film. In the late 1990s VideoFest was reborn as Transmediale in order to address the burgeoning multimedia art scene and Club Transmediale emerged as a forum for a rapidly evolving club culture shortly thereafter.

Broeckmann used a selection of videos presented last year as talking points in addressing the culture surrounding the festival. This work included pieces by Matthias Meyer, Claire Hope, Liu Wei and Tim Shore. The Liu Wei piece was incredible! It provided a compelling window into the pervasive fear, denial and erasure surrounding the memory of the 1989 student uprising in Beijing.