The 20th edition of the Impakt Festival will take place from October 14 through to October 18. And it is not entirely coincidental that this anniversary edition of the festival focuses on the experience of time. The Accelerated Living programme of the festival explores the ways in which we experience time and speed, and the ways in which our experience changes under the infuence of social and technological developments.
For the “Accelerated Living” programme, Impakt invited two guest curators: Stoffel Debuysere (Belgium) and María Palacios Cruz (Spain). As guest curators, they have compiled an exciting programme which throws light on the festival theme from a wide variety of angles. The programme features concerts, performances, screenings, new media, a conference and an exhibition comprising a broad range of styles, genres and approaches to time, from dubstep to documentary, from time dimensions turned inside out to 24 hour performances and double-quick film editing, from a brand new digital opera produced especially for the festival and Internet projects to gems from avantgarde history.
Next to the thematic programme of Accelerated Living, the Festival features the annual Panorama programme which provides an overview of cutting edge film and video productions from the international exhibition and festival circuit. For a period of five days, the city of Utrecht will be the centre stage for important trends and new visions within our contemporary media
culture.
Panorama: Impakt Invites
In the Panorama programme, Impakt provides an annual overview of contemporary cutting edge film and video art. The works have been selected by Impakt at various international festivals and exhibitions. In the so-called Impakt Invites series some Panorama artists are put centre stage, they are interviewed and invited to present a selection from their oeuvre. Impakt also invited three organizations to present themselves.
Touring Programs
Impakt Touring Programs offers an overview of the most remarkable new productions by young artists from all over the world. In the past these mainly consisted of ‘The Best Of’ – programs of various festival editions like: Impakt Highlights 2000, Impakt Highlights 2001, etc. Next to these Highlight-programs certain theme-programs where composed. However in 2007 a new direction was taken, because the feeling was that the programs could travel longer around the world without being outdated. The new name for Impakt Highlights 2005 is the program ‘Adventures in Sound & Image’, the earlier Impakt Highlight editions (2004 and older) are no longer available. At the end of 2007 the list below shows the new Touring Programs. On each page you’ll find a extended description of the program and the individual works.
We Are Time: Introduction to the Exhibition
Wednesday October 14 till Sunday October 18, AAMU/Academiegalerie/Flatland Gallery
The passing of time is something we feel intimately familiar with, and yet it continuously slips away from us. Centuries ago, St. Augustine already caught this tension in words: “What is Time? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not.” The invention of clock time provided a partial solution: time was rationalised, adjusted to the rhythms of growing industrialisation. This transformation – symbolically completed with the introduction of standard time and the division of the world into time zones – resonated deeply in our social and cultural lives. The experience-based understanding of time was replaced by a rigid, linear and numerical logic which has gradually become embedded in our subconscious. The arrival of ICT and globalisation has pierced this unilateral and troublesome relationship. Ironically enough, the dawning of the computer age –the main source of today’s acceleration – has allowed for new perspectives on the role and potential of time. This exhibition takes that openness as a starting point and presents a series of works which each in their own way strive for a particular time awareness. Different dimensions of time, both social and natural, objective and subjective, are unfolded, deformed and combined, in search for new forms of perception and imagination of time.
Screenings: introduction
“Take some time, take some more, time is passing, the time of your life, the earth rotates, seasons come and go, the machine sorts zeros from ones, as another thousand tiny bursts of phosphorescent light dance to the rhythm of the wind and the tide.” – Chris Welsby
It seems as if time is increasingly out of joint. We no longer experience time as a succession or an acceleration of events, but rather as being adrift in a fragmented world of informationstimuli, out of the realm of chronology and linearity. What is the impact of this evolution on our perception patterns? How do the different internal, natural, social and technological rhythms relate to each other and infuence our daily sensory perception? What is the role and potential of cinema, together with music, the art form most particularly devoted to the shaping force of time? These and other questions will be explored through a series of contemporary and historic film and video works addressing the relation between space, movement, technology and (our experience of) time.
Conference
Thursday, October 15 2009 / 10:00 – 18:30
Filmtheater ‘t Hoogt, Utrecht
“In the sun that is young once only. Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his mean” – Dylan Thomas, ‘Fern Hill’
Contemporary science and technology have made possible a temporality which -although still based upon clock time- has exploded into countless different time fractions and speeds beyond human comprehension. Today we seem to live in several time zones at the same time, propelled by a variety of internal and external time mechanisms and innumerable rhythms which continuously vibrate, resonate, connect, oscillate and disconnect. How to grasp the temporal complexity that surrounds and occupies us? What sort of ecologies of time and speed have we developed under the influence of new technologies and what is their impact on our body and senses? This conference brings together a number of international thinkers who offer new perspectives on our contemporary experience of time and speed.