The 2020 edition of Meta Marathon, conceived by the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf under the artistic direction of Alain Bieber and curated by festival director Jasmin Grimm, was dedicated to the theme of Cyborgs. Planned as a continuous 42-hour festival from 22 to 24 May 2020, the programme was to bring together performances, lectures, installations, workshops and collaborative experiments exploring the increasingly fluid relationship between humans and technology.

The visual identity takes one fundamental physical difference between humans and machines as its starting point: their temperature. The human body continuously generates heat and maintains a temperature of approximately 37°C. A metal machine, by contrast, has no body temperature of its own; it absorbs and reflects the thermal conditions of its surroundings. This contrast formed the basis of a colour spectrum moving between the warmth of the human body and the imagined coldness of the machine.

A sequence of colours ranging from warm to cold translates this thermal transition into a flexible graphic system. The spectrum does not present humans and machines as fixed opposites, but visualises the numerous intermediate states in which biological bodies, technological devices and digital systems increasingly merge.

Applied across posters, printed matter, digital communications and the festival website, the system reflects the central questions of the programme: Where does the human body end and technology begin? How do prostheses, algorithms, artificial intelligence and connected devices transform our bodies, identities and behaviour? And if humans and machines continuously adapt to one another, can they still be understood as separate entities?

Although the festival was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its visual identity lives on in our digital archive and in our memories.