Across and Beyond: A Transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices was ostensibly published to mark thirty years of Transmediale, the art and digital culture festival that happens in Berlin each winter. Summing up just one iteration of this sprawling festival is hard enough; doing justice to thirty years of art and theory is something else again. Should the editors of this kind of book document its history? Serve up its greatest hits? Try to influence its future? Over its fifteen essays and ten profiles of artworks, Across and Beyond does a little of each. The result is a book that uses Transmediale as a platform for a series of propositions about how we might think media now—and imagine its futures differently.
This book’s editors include Transmediale’s outgoing director, Kristoffer Gansing; Winchester School of Art professors Ryan Bishop and Jussi Parikka; and the writer and editor, Elvia Wilk. To lend it coherence,...
