transmediale is the biggest festival for art and the creative use of digital media in Germany. The theme of transmediale.04 is Fly Utopia! In contrast, the transmediale award competition is an independent element of the festival, so that submissions to the competition can relate to the festival theme, but they don't have to. Likewise, it is possible to send in concepts, project proposals and materials about the theme, independent of the competition. Dreams and illusions have been abandoned by our present society only on the surface. Rather, after the collapse of the 20th cenutry’s grand ideologies there is once again an increasing search for concepts that point beyond the restrictions of the factual and that offer visions of the old and the new potentials of creative action. In this context, digital media, and technology in general, maintain their ambivalent image as objects of utopian hope and as signs of an impending apocalypse.