Reality Addicts demand more than the smooth surfaces of a medialised world, more than the total CCTV illusion of security, the closed spaces of computer games, or the immersive soundscapes of MP3 players. They enjoy the paradoxes, celebrate technical defects, and play with the almost possible.
Reality Addicts don't attempt to understand or evaluate the world. They install little traps, commit themselves to nonsense, and seek to multiply reality by means of exaggeration, rupture, distance, and ever new diversions.
Reality Addicts need a sense of humour. Humour helps them to pinpoint contradictions, to connect the incompatible, and to challenge alternative realities. Humour is communication, it breaks through the isolation and opens up to the Other. Humour is their favourite method of social engagement and critique.
transmediale is a festival for art and digital culture. It is a forum of communication for artists, media workers and a broad public interested in arts. transmediale.06 includes a large media art exhibition about humour as an artistic strategy. transmediale.06 is devoted to the Reality Addicts and their artistic strategies, with which they subvert the technological paradigm of reality.
Festival: 3 - 7 February 2006
Exhibition: 3 February - 19 March 2006
