Just back from Berlin where I wallowed in artistic conspiracies and others for a good 5 days. A loyal visitor to the Transmediale since 2000, I was particular excited about this edition – not only because former colleague at V2_ and good friend Stephen Kovats became the new artistic director – but also because I had the honour of being in the jury for the Transmediale Awards this year. The story of winners, prizes, jury processes and award ceremonies, deserves a post of its own, as it shares features with the model of a consensus democracy governed by 5 very heterogeneous rulers.

This year’s Transmediale was intriguingly titled “Conspire”, and it sought to “examine dubious worlds of story telling and remote opinion making, […] look critically at the means of creative conspiratorial strategies, and use these to uncover new forms of expression and digital discourse.” As usual the program consisted of an extensive film & video program, conferences, debates, performances, an exhibition guest curated by Natasa Petresin-Bachelez, and a highly conspiratorial get-together called the Bilderberg Salon, of which I moderated one for almost 7 (!!) hours on February 1st. Expectedly for a festival of this size, there was an eclectic mix of artists, theorists, activists, and other cultural and media practitioners, who wished to “challenge the notions of conspiracy, intensify our understanding of collaborative and network practice, and question the many mechanisms of control technological society is confronted with on a daily basis.” But did they/we really manage to challenge things? The sense I got was rather one of a healthy - but heightened paranoia - for the media and technologies we work with, and find ourselves surrounded with. And perhaps also a cautious acknowledgement that everything seems to be in a state of crisis: the real, the image, politics, aesthetics, discourse, the subject…and that we do not always have the power or agency to really do something about it. This is not defeatism, but rather a coming to terms with the fact that some forms of resistance just do not work, and that there’s strength to be found in failure, or even that conspiring to a certain extent with your enemy, might get you further than fighting him/her.

So what marked this festival somehow, was the amount of presentations focusing exactly on this issue of distrust of terminology, medium, and representation. It seemed as if there was almost no possibility to escape the conspiracy of the image…or of art, in that respect. No presentation brought this idea better home than Timothy Druckrey’s keynote lecture “The ‘Real’ Conspiracy.” Druckrey is Director of the Graduate Photography and Digital Imaging program at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and also works as a critic, curator and writer. A prominent figure within the media arts world, his persona added to the conspiratorial and somewhat sectarian ambiance, which seems to envelop these media festivals. (By the way, that’s why we love these events: it’s our own private dip in what we believe secret societies to be and to function like)

Before embarking on a presentation which one member of the audience rightly described as “curated” he reminded us – Public Service Announcement style - of the still unresolved and tragic case of CAE’s Steve Kurtz, and the documentary fiction Strange Culture, starring a.o. Tilda Swinton, made by the American film essayist Lynn Hershman Leeson about the case that shocked the art world (and hopefully a little beyond too) with its fundamental breach on freedom of speech and expression, as well as an assault on academic and creative freedom. Willing or unwilling, showing the short trailer of “Strange Culture” set the tone for the talk: in noone or nothing we trust. It somehow made sense – for a talk on the failure of image representation – to indulge the audience in an abundance of clips and a wealth of philosophical cross-referencing: from a Heinz von Foerster interview from Lutz Dambeck’s – by now new media cult film - Das Netz, to Slavoj Zizek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, to the usual Postmodern suspects (Virilio, Deleuze, Baudrilliard).

He then (unfortunately) read a paper about the history of conspiratorial representation. I always deplore the fact speakers are unkind to their audiences and read their texts, rather than finding a more engaging format. True, the cover of the written word lends a distance and allows one to develop intricate arguments, but the conspiracy of the written word in public presentations is one Druckrey failed to mention.

Matters of format aside, Druckrey discussed that the crisis of representation is not something new: every representational system – by default – produces its own crisis. I like this (very postmodern) reasoning quite a lot, I have to admit: the crisis in ontology eventually becomes a raison d’etre, i.e. its own ontology. In other words: I am in crisis, therefore I exist. Druckrey reiterated a rhetorical question - which reference I have forgotten, but in times of imaga end data overload seems pertinent: “Where do the pictures go when they’re not on screen?” This is the million dollar question: how do we dig beyond the layers of mediated representation? Druckrey pointed out that this question assumes that there actually is such a thing as a desirable real…and yet, he claims, this fiction of “the real” is an indispensable conspiracy. Reality has been privatized and has been relegated to the realm of online social networks such as facebook, myspace youtube and flickr. This is what he called the scripting of illusion. Within this illusion we continuously hunt for the real and its reality. Within this context the media spectacle has become the subject of art: the representational systems have shifted, as the substance of the real has turned against itself. Conspiracy or crisis…something’s definitely fishy in the State of The Real. The illusion of a one-to-one relationship of signifier and signified has long gone out of the window. In the end, much of what gets imprinted on our retinas, is spin and perception management.

Druckrey suggested that if art is supposed to be subversive, then perhaps it should abandon the representational image altogether. I think this is a very interesting, though highly problematic, proposition. Of course there are plenty examples of images having non-mimetic value. However, we may ask ourselves whether taking out the semblance of the real for good is just a placebo effect to sweeten up the crisis of representation. Where does it leave our responsibility towards the image as producers and consumers? Is this the 3rd pill – sugar-coated in subversive aesthetics – Zizek in his Matrix impersonation was pleading for? Or are there different strategies we could employ to bring back or rather produce images and an imaginary that is meaningful and rooted in the realities – no matter how constructed – of how we experience our lives.