The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform.

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin

A wire brush spins around randomly, threatening your open-toe sandals. A motion activated vacuum pump sucks out the air from a sealed gallery space: the longer the viewers remain inside, the less air for them to breathe. A cobble stone is rotating on a rope. The sole purpose of that kettle is to spread red acrylic paint on your shoes. An electric fence used to control livestock on farms criss-crosses the path that leads to an art gallery or the bar. Elsewhere a randomly activated tripwire awaits visitors…

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No matter how much I love exhibitions at new media art festivals, i often find myself suspecting that the curatorial vision behind many of them is little more than an after-thought. This was certainly not the case with Alles, was Sie über Chemie wissen müssen and i can’t praise the work of curators Hicham Khalidi and Suzanne Wallinga enough for their exquisite, intelligent contribution to Club Transmediale

Every single day, Christin Lahr is giving 1 cent to the German Federal Ministry of Finance via an online bank transfer. She fills in the 108 characters of the ‘reason for payment’ box with a few words from Karl Marx’s CAPITAL – A Critique of Political Economy. Members of The House Of Natural Fiber are teaching Indonesians how to make their own safe, affordable booze and Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern ruffled a few feathers when they launched Wikipedia Art

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The “Tropospheric Laboratory” allows insights into cloud cores and other matter of the apogee. The installation narrates the synthesis of clouds and shows varying conditions and combinations of art and science in the absence of weight. The “laboratory” is the gravimetric document of “Cloud Core Scanner” – an experiment and artistic project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis, carried out on board a German Aerospace Center research plane

transmediale’s 2009 award exhibition presents a spectrum of artistic positions, inquiries and responses to the multifacetted, and often contradictory scenarios of climate change. Will the melting of the polar ice-caps lead to an emergency situation in which survival is paramount? Beyond the spectre of a world knocked out of climatic control by our collective lack of foresight, the exhibition explores the symptoms, contexts and possible futures of a seemingly imperceptible yet fundamental change