Vorspiel 2026

a citywide programme
by spaces and initiatives
around transmediale
and CTM festivals


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The Vorspiel Collection brings together artworks, films, photo-essays, texts, graphs, images, podcasts, sound experiments, and more.


Image Gallery

Find some impressions of the 2022 opening here.


Video

Our famous interview Staffette has returned! Watch this year's edition featuring a few of the participating spaces of Vorspiel / transmediale & CTM. The 2022 edition marks the 11th anniversary of our initiative and aim to showcase the richness and diversity of Berlin's independent project spaces and artist initiatives.


Video

A look behind the Shared Frame streamed event for Vorspiel 2021 (pandemic edition).


Essay

How we got there and how important it was for Panke.


Essay Artwork

Postcards from the Metaverse speculates on the value of the popular 20th century medium – the postcard – in providing accessible and underrepresented perspectives on a newly- hyped infrastructure


Essay

Former transmediale artistic director Kristoffer Gansing applies a bit of home-grown numerology to reminisce about the secrets of Vorspiel!


Essay

The reSource network has been an extremely valuable resource in the process of establishing and running SPEKTRUM Berlin. It allowed us to connect with like-minded people in the city, to start up new collaborations, and to learn from those facing similar issues in running project spaces.


Essay

The essay summarizes the Czech-Brazilian cultural theorist and media philosopher Vilém Flusser’s ideas on the apparatus, codes, and programmed and manipulated society. He ends his texts by highlighting the importance of artists who might be able to play with and against the apparatus and challenge mass media and their preprogrammed functions.


Essay

From 2011 to 2014, Tatiana Bazzichelli and a team of others designed a sprawling event program called “reSource transmedial culture Berlin,” which picked up on transmediale-related projects and flung them far further.


Essay

Since 2013 designtransfer – the gallery and communicates interface of the Faculty of Design, Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin) and the public – participates yearly at Vorspiel to present various projects as exhibitions, installations, and talks related to their New Media & Design courses.


Video

Watch a digital interview Staffette with some of the participating spaces of Vorspiel / transmediale & CTM. The 2021 edition marks the 10th anniversary of our initiative and aim to showcase the richness and diversity of Berlin's independent project spaces and artist initiatives in collaboration with transmediale.


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Events Performance, Installation

Can You Feel My Diasporic Love? Affective Encounters of Wonder, Body, and Machine


19:30 –
alpha nova & galerie futura

A multimedia performance weaving sound, light, touch, sculpture, AI, and bioelectric systems to explore migration, love, and belonging within landscapes shaped by technology, surveillance, and rising global authoritarianism. By positioning desire and the body as subversive forces, the work stages moments of wonder in which embodied affect becomes a mode of aesthetic cognition—reorganizing perception, attention, and ethical orientation prior to reflective judgment.

Developed under Dr Gao’s SensoryHybrid³, the project integrates real-time AI with bioelectric sensing to create affective feedback loops between audience physiology and an evolving audiovisual environment. Through these encounters, meaning emerges not through symbolic representation alone, but through felt, bodily attunement. The performance explores how affect-driven aesthetic experience can destabilize cultural hierarchies, interrupt technopolitical control, and reimagine relations between human, non-human, and machine intelligence.

Venue: alpha nova & galerie futura Directors: Sylvia Sadzunski & Dr. Katharina Koch Intro:

Performer: Dr. Chang Gao Berlin-based multimedia artist and researcher whose work explores AI bias, affect, and wonder as modes of aesthetic cognition. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art (London) and is a research associate at Intervenierende Künste (Freie Universität Berlin). She also serves as a board member and communication director of the feminist collective art&dialogue (Berlin), and is the founder and director of the Social Innovation Research Lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (China). Working across robotics, bioelectric sensing, sculpture, film, augmented reality, and real-time AI systems, Gao investigates how embodied affect, desire, and sensory experience reorganize perception, agency, and ethical orientation prior to reflective judgment. Her practice treats aesthetic experience as epistemically productive, foregrounding moments of wonder in which bodily responsiveness generates meaning beyond symbolic representation. By mobilizing eroticism, supernormal stimuli, and affective computing, Gao develops immersive installations and performances that challenge technopolitical control, cultural hegemony, and the anthropocentric biases embedded in AI systems. Speaking from diasporic and often repressed positions, her work uses affect-driven creative languages to reimagine relations between human, non-human, and machine intelligence. Her research and multimedia works have been exhibited internationally in Berlin, London, Seoul, Utrecht, Graz, Tokyo, Helsinki, and across China.

www.gaochangart.net Instagram: @gao.chang_rca

alpha nova & galerie futura Am Flutgraben 3 12435 Berlin

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