Transmediale '08 'Conspire'- Berlin

Transmediale '08 'Conspire'- Berlin

part 4

Spy 'Vs' Spy was a somewhat odd talk by Sharon Daniels in the bilderberg room at Transmediale, who's work consisted of a flash website which gave a voice to women prisoners in the USA. Audio recordings of interviews with prisoners are accessible from the site, all of which were recorded clandestinely while in the guise of a legal representative of the women. Her aims seem to let people know of the conditions under which the prisoners live, while at the same time keep it under the radar to avoid any repercussions for herself and the women inmates. This talk was odd, because it came across as more of a statement of the American legal and political system then any to do with multimedia : other than the fact that the website she uses won a Webby. The same website that she couldn't seem to navigate around, but to be fair that was not all down to her, the talk was plagued with problems and was 40 minutes late starting for technical reasons. Sadly any message she tried to make was lost as the technical glitches continued until the talk descended into farce, video not playing, no audio, deafening audio, it was all to much. You'd have thought at a multimedia festival there would be a squadron of techies on hand to sort these things out and at least display a web page without too many problems.
There did seem to be a fair few technical problems at Transmediale, which was a little surprising for a world conference type event, though it wasn't all bad. On the whole, the festival was very impressive, showing a wide range of installations, films, lectures and performances and was a hugely beneficial trip for us - i wish i had as much stamina to attend more events, especially to see some of the other things going on at club transmediale in the night time.