The theme of Transitio is “affects” a word whose English meaning is somewhat split between its usage as a noun or a verb. As a noun it could mean just “a feeling” but more specifically tends to refer to “Affeketenlehre” or “theory of affects” a pre- or early-modern notion of the passions and emotions as they are embedded within artistic works via a network of precise and formulaic theatrical, visual or musical gestures. As a verb it means quite simply to have an influence upon. The intention of the Transitio Symposium is to examine the complex of sensations, emotions and thought processes that proceed and follow from the digital interface. While the digital medium as we experience it rests upon a succession of historical and philosophical developments e.g. the enlightenment, romanticism, modernism; and upon a host of complexes like spectacle, cinema, site; nonetheless the digital domain’s highly precise nature of its codedness – the software, the hardware, the networks – do bring artists and audiences to the verge of an encounter with something akin to the pre-modern in the manner of the “Affektenlehre” of the 17th century, with all their coolness, distance and autonomic response. It is this cool codedness, and the behaviors it engenders that the Symposium intends to reveal and examine. Such study and discussion may afford valuable insights into artistic practices and serve better to identify the locus of the politics of pleasure within the regime of the digital. The first of the affects to be considered, then, are the feelings the spirit and the sensations that the artist has when dealing with a digital medium - the feeling of the interface while she affects it. The affects are also the feelings sensations and emotions of the individual viewer has when experiencing the artwork, as it affects her. And in the case of interactive or immersive works, the viewer affecting the software. Transitio IV intends to examine the basis of these affects - both the action of the user and the feeling of the interface. These factors may be examined in several aspects:

• Code itself, as it passes from gesture to abstraction to perception;
• The encoding and decoding to result in the creation of affect that did not originally exist within the gesture. e.g. perceptual features that are lost or created by translation from one perceptual regime to another, loss of feeling and the creation of pure excesses.
• As hindrances or inhibitory elements, that become an attendant and ineluctable aspect of the process of creation, for example the idea of the ‘learning curve’;
• In the transfer of knowledge, often itself made remote by the diffuse nature of online communities, time delays and exchange-tokens such as user groups and instructables.
• Following from this, within institutional contexts where computer code becomes cultural code and normalizes human behavior and social structures.

These are the several topics which the Transitio Symposium hopes to address, leading less toward conclusions and simplifications, but rather toward a more open field of possibilities where obstacles are identified, paths are revealed and new ground is broken.

Paul DeMarinis
Coordinador Académico del Festival