Transmediale is a festival for art and digital culture. It is a forum of communication for artists, media workers and a broad public interested in arts. Transmediale includes exhibitions, conferences, live performances, artist presentations and a variety of fringe events throughout Berlin. Transmediale was founded in 1988 as a video art festival and has taken place annually, in Berlin, ever since. First conceived in close relation to the Berlinale film festival, the festival changed its name from 'VideoFest' to 'transmediale' in 1997/98, thus reflecting the fact that its programmatic scope had broadened to encompass a wide range of multimedia-related art forms. Since then, digital technologies have become firmly integrated into our everyday lives. 'Digital culture' is no avantgarde terrain any more. transmediale has responded to this development by focusing its programmes not on the latest technical novelties and scientific speculations, but on the actual usage that people are making of such technologies. One way of emphasising the cultural approach to media technologies has been to formulate themes for the annual festivals that are not technologically focused, but refer to the engagement with technologies as a social paractice. Thus, we went from 'Do It Yourself!' (2001) and 'Go Public!' (2002), through 'Play Global!' (2003) and 'Fly Utopia!' (2004), to 'Basics' (2005), 'Reality Addicts' (2006), and 'Unfinish!' (2007). The programme of transmediale focuses on art that reflects about social and cultural meaning of technologies and media. At the same time, the festival places these artistic practices in the wider context of digital culture by offering a series of related conferences, workshops and discussions.