The post-digital condition

In recent years, the term »post-digital« gained popularity for describing a new kind of critical media practice, through which a young generation of DIY artists and makers have been revisiting analogue production and distribution models such as zines, analogue print, and photography. Most often, these types of practices are not happening completely outside of the digital but in increasingly hybrid form, such as in the post-digital publishing culture described by people like Alessandro Ludovico, where new and old coexist and mutually feed each other. Furthermore, the post-digital »movement« can be seen as a response to and even a reaction against the perpetual utopianism and corporate high-gloss of mainstreamed digital culture. At the same time as the post-digital can be seen as a critical and artistic response of the so called »digital natives« towards their oversaturated technological environments however, there are signs that post-digital is becoming more like a »condition« applying to all forms of practice »after the digital.« Recently, major business personae such as Rene Obermann, the former CEO of Deutsche Telekom, have been using the term post-digital to describe a society in which the digital is not »sexy« by itself any longer but simply a kind of naturalised environment where innovation now has to happen on other terms than the purely technological. In this context, transmediale festival asks how the post-digital can be »de-naturalised« and understood as being constructed through specific social, political, and economic conditions of a society now inescapably marked by the arguably revolutionary transformations of global digital network technologies.

Digital culture in the afterglow

The starting point of the 2014 transmediale festival is to consider the post-digital as an »afterglow« moment of the digital: afterglow being that moment of deep twilight when the dust that has risen from the earth into the atmosphere is temporarily lit up, as well as being a term that refers to either positive or negative mental after-effects of drug use. Afterglow is meant to conjure the ambivalent state of digital culture, where what seems to remain from the so-called digital revolution is a futuristic nostalgia for the once-promised shiny high-tech world now crumbling in our hands. The challenge that this moment poses is how to use that state of post-digital culture in between trash and treasure as a chance to invent new speculative practices. These should resist nostalgic or defeatist ideas, yet still use waste as a starting point from which to deal with the burning issues of today. The afterglow is the moment after the digital revolution, which is now turning into dust as we struggle to find new pathways in the wastelands of its aftermath. In waking up from the »digital hangover,« we find ourselves in the midst of pressing issues such as the corrupt ecology of technological resources (minerals, metals, and e-waste), mass surveillance, excessive big data schemes, and the post-digital lives that these phenomena impact on a daily basis.

Taking the afterglow phenomenon as a metaphor for the present condition of digital culture, what is the »dust« that is still suspended inside its glossy surface, and what can we discover within it, or experience through it? The hypes of Big Data, Smart Cities, Gamification, Internet of Things, Fablabs... all tell of an increased disintegration of the divisions between culture, nature, and technology. At the same time, the discussion surrounding these phenomena is tied to the digital paradigm with its promotion of antiseptic, high-tech simplification of everyday life, and opportunities for all. But these hypes can also be seen from the perspective of their intimate connection to waste: in the way they promote excess, exploitation, and the wasting of resources of the material, human/animal, and mental world. In this sense, the digital has in fact always been a classic case where what is central to existence – trash and dust – is being pushed out to the margins. Similarly, the changing conditions for our online/offline existences form a perspective that twists the post-human discourse into one of bodies as the »trash of the machines,« and making everyday life into embodied transitions in between trash and treasure.

The irony is that today, it seems as if the digital itself is becoming the trash that refuses to go away. If the digital is becoming like the »dust« that is shining inside the twilight, we may bask a little in its beauty, but also urgently need to develop new vocabularies and practices that proactively rethink culture for the moment after. In line with the overall festival approach to the theme afterglow, the transmediale 2014 programme traces cultural transitions through the trash that now makes up our post-digital existence, in terms of its mediatic materials, subjects, and emerging politics.