Sa, 08.08.2026
3 pm
Talk

about 60 minutes

conversation pieces

The series of talks; conversation pieces takes everyday technologies as its point of departure and situates them within the context of the swimming pool. Each edition starts from a text that provides the thematic framework and serves as a shared point of reference. Guests are invited who engage with the topic from artistic, theoretical, or technological perspectives and share their thoughts or their own work through discussion and exchange.

The swimming pool may initially seem like a curious place for such conversations, and that is perhaps precisely why it is the right one. It is a place of pausing, of surfacing, of coexistence. Here, where we can float weightlessly in the water and the gentle sound of splashing creates a stimulating background murmur, the question also arises: which technologies support us, and which instead pull us (downward)? How do we navigate the internet, what do we conceal in the process, and what kinds of spaces emerge where we withdraw ourselves? What does it mean to hold—as both a technological and a cultural practice? To what extent are container technologies—from the cloud to the archive, from the algorithm to the database—also political spaces? And what possibilities emerge when we think of technology not as a tool of conquest, but as a container?

The conversation series conversation pieces is curated by Anna-Lena Panter as part of the cooperation between transmediale and Tropez.

The conversations take place in German.

Photo: Jennifer Mehigan, Zombies, Ghosts and Dirt: A Performance in a Graveyard Garden, Installation, transmediale 2021–22, silent green Kultu

Sa, 08.08.2026
3 pm
Talk

about 60 minutes

conversation pieces

The series of talks; conversation pieces takes everyday technologies as its point of departure and situates them within the context of the swimming pool. Each edition starts from a text that provides the thematic framework and serves as a shared point of reference. Guests are invited who engage with the topic from artistic, theoretical, or technological perspectives and share their thoughts or their own work through discussion and exchange.

The swimming pool may initially seem like a curious place for such conversations, and that is perhaps precisely why it is the right one. It is a place of pausing, of surfacing, of coexistence. Here, where we can float weightlessly in the water and the gentle sound of splashing creates a stimulating background murmur, the question also arises: which technologies support us, and which instead pull us (downward)? How do we navigate the internet, what do we conceal in the process, and what kinds of spaces emerge where we withdraw ourselves? What does it mean to hold—as both a technological and a cultural practice? To what extent are container technologies—from the cloud to the archive, from the algorithm to the database—also political spaces? And what possibilities emerge when we think of technology not as a tool of conquest, but as a container?

The conversation series conversation pieces is curated by Anna-Lena Panter as part of the cooperation between transmediale and Tropez.

The conversations take place in German.

Photo: Jennifer Mehigan, Zombies, Ghosts and Dirt: A Performance in a Graveyard Garden, Installation, transmediale 2021–22, silent green Kultu