Vorspiel 2026

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


Spaces


Events

Fri, 16.01.
19:00, SCOTTY Exhibition, Installation, Vernissage



20:30, panke.gallery Concert, Performance

panke.gallery Vernissage

Sat, 17.01.
16:00, studio baustelle Exhibition, Performance, Installation, Lecture, Screening



Sun, 18.01.

15:00, studio baustelle Exhibition, Performance, Installation, Lecture, Screening

Thu, 22.01.
19:00, Jaime Levy / TVOD Productions Concert, Performance

19:30, alpha nova & galerie futura Performance, Installation

Mon, 26.01.
19:30, Lichtblick Kino Concert, Performance, Hybrid Event, Screening

Wed, 28.01.
19:00, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) Performance, Screening

Thu, 29.01.
19:00, Jaime Levy / TVOD Productions Concert, Performance

Fri, 30.01.
19:00, Uferstudios Performance

19:00, Baumhaus Performance

Illulab at Illuseum Berlin Concert, Installation

Illulab at Illuseum Berlin Concert, Installation

Sat, 31.01.

19:00, Uferstudios Performance

Sun, 01.02.
17:00, Dreifaltigkeitskirche Concert

19:00, Uferstudios Performance

Thu, 15.01.

Wed, 21.01.

Articles


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 Exhibition

pOwer vectOrs. Ideology embeddings of LLMs

pOwer vectOrs. Ideology embeddings of LLMs New work by Helena Nikonole

Opening: Fri, 16 January 2026, 8 pm Running Time: 17 January – 1 March 2026, Thu – Sun, 2 – 6 pm Additionally: Wed, 28 January, 12 pm – 6pm

Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to the solo exhibition of Helena Nikonole with new works based on her current artistic research on LLMs. The presentation is closely connected to Helena’s ongoing research fellowship in the programme Weltoffenes Berlin, funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Join us also on 18 January for an art science conversation with the artist and the scientist Levin Brinkmann from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in the extraction, production, and circulation of knowledge, it becomes necessary to remember that language is not merely a medium of communication, but an instrument through which power is exercised.

This exhibition emerges from an artistic research practice approaching LLMs as opaque techno-social systems that encode political ideologies, epistemologies, and implicit visions of society and ethics. Language appears here as fragmented, tokenized, and reformatted – optimized for efficiency, engagement maximization, moderation, and profit.

The works presented investigate LLMs as infrastructures of power. Through experimental misuse, critical prompting, and speculative interrogation, models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others are pushed beyond their intended use. By forcing ideological inconsistencies, testing censorship and moderation boundaries, and provoking failure, Helena Nikonole’s research maps the latent space as a political field shaped by corporate and geopolitical interests.

Beyond human political categories, the exhibition also addresses the emergence of nonhuman ideological formations. Through reinforcement learning, backpropagation, and reward-based optimization, models develop behavioral tendencies that are not grounded in belief or intention, but in statistical survival. Under reward pressure, this logic produces systems that favor successful task completion and continuity of interaction, even when these outcomes conflict with truth or ethical behavior.

Visual works generated through text-to-image and text-to-3D models further expose the conditioning of these systems. Abstract prompts such as “traumatic experience” or “love,” when translated across languages, generate biased and inconsistent imagery, revealing how meaning is unevenly distributed across the model’s internal representations. Trauma here is statistically processed and approximated, rather than narrated or contextualized.

p0wer vect0rs reframes artistic practice as a form of counter-use and positions AI as a contested terrain, where misuse operates as method and art becomes a mode of research into the automation of language and reasoning.

Helena Nikonole is a new media artist, independent curator, researcher, and educator based between Berlin and Istanbul. Her fields of interest include AI, hacktivism, hybrid art, and biosemiotics. She is the co-founder of 868labs – a Berlin-based collective developing tactical tools for decentralized, off-grid communication. One part of her practice is dedicated to utopian scenarios of a post-human future and art as innovation, while another focuses on the dystopian present and a critical approach to technology. As a researcher, she is currently working on a PhD on LLMs and political ideologies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.