In January, SHAPE researchers Christian Ulrik Andersen, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, Nicolas Maleve and Pablo Velasco attended the Transmediale Festival 2025 in Berlin. As part of this, the workshop "Everything is a matter of distance" was organised by DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Center) in collaboration with Transmediale and SHAPE.

The workshop dealt with historical and contemporary tropes of distance in digital culture. Included were projects that discuss questions of distance and/or proximity and how they relate to the way we use - and are used by - platforms, interfaces and late capitalist politics.

Collectively developed were a sense of what methods, critical tools and conceptual models can help us see the nuances of proximity and distance from different angles.

Christian Ulrik Andersen, who helped organise and run the workshop, elaborates on the workshop's background, themes and framework below.

• What were the main points discussed at the workshop and why are they important right now?

The workshop was based on the transmediale festival's theme ‘(near) near but - far’, and in particular the meaning of proximity and distance. These are both terms for some of the states of being in the digital world, but are also technical terms that operate in algorithms, software and hardware. In the workshop, we specifically discussed how the two sides are connected. Highlighting the connection is important to understand how we as humans are both controlled by technology, but also have the space to explore, challenge, and negotiate the meaning of technology.

•  How are digital infrastructures changing our experience of proximity and distance - and what implications does this have for our social lives?

Discussing technological infrastructures took up a lot of space. Networks and platforms are present in many people's lives, but typically operate covertly, and are often centralised in a few hands with little opportunity to negotiate their presence. In other words, they keep us together and connected, but also keep us at a distance, reducing our ability to influence and control them.

• Can aesthetics be used as a tool to challenge the digital mechanisms that govern our social lives - and do you have concrete examples from the workshop?

As transmediale is a festival of art and digital culture, the question of artistic and cultural practices also featured heavily - both how they define a space of possibility, but also how they themselves are changing. For example, researcher and dancer Daria Iuriichuk explained how platforms choreograph the presence of the body, but also how dancers perform on platforms such as Instagram and OnlyFans to explore and visualise the way this takes place.

PhD student Sami P. Itävuori from London South Bank University, who researches museum image archives, explained how something that seems visually recognisable also challenges the notion of artistic creation and value - for example, through the way archives are used to train algorithms for image generation. In general, the themes were broad, ranging from image generation, landscape, architecture and urban development to dance, sound, body and gender culture.

Not least, the workshop also touched on the importance of proximity and distance in the way we conduct research. As an important part of the process, the participants collectively produced a publication that was launched and presented at the festival, which is held annually at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin and attracts over 25,000 visitors.

The publication produced in connection with the workshop can be read here.