The Impakt Festival is a yearly manifestation on media art, founded in 1988 in the city of Utrecht, Netherlands.
It showcases films, video art, performances, music, conferences and other special events with works from international artists. Dealing with questions about society, digital culture and media, the festival aims to tackle pressing questions from an interdisciplinary perspective.
History
The Impakt Festival started in 1988 as a festival for experimental arts. Since its first edition the Impakt Festival has been offering a variety of events including video and film screenings, exhibitions, conferences, talks, concerts and dance nights. Besides the annual Panorama program, which is still Impakt's official selection of recent film and video productions, the festival also has a thematic program that is focused on contemporary matters. Interdisciplinarity is embraced and efforts for balance and multi-perspectiveness is preferred. Over the years, the festival has taken the form of a more thematic program. Impakt also operates an artist-in-residency scheme, outside of the annual festival, along with year-round events.
1990s
The 1990s editions were characterized by an, already proven, experimental research that formed a positive stimulus to the past image and soundculture and a necessary supplement to the mass media’s supply of entertainment. During those editions were screened works from Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Mathias Muller, Bruce Conner, Bill Viola, Kurt Kren, Dereck Jarman and William Wegman.
2000s
As Impakt Festival's prestige as a European media art festival grew, the turn of the millennium saw a turn to focusing on a more specifically on an annual thematic program. Themes included:
2001 Group Formation
2002 Whatever Happened To All The Fun In The World? 2003 It's Happening Again: Fashion, Music, Politics 2004 Cultural Autopsy 2005 Adventures in Sound and Image 2006 The Great Outdoors 2007 Adventures in Sound and Image 2008 Yourspace 2009 Accelerated Living
During the 2000s editions, works from Annika Larsson, Magnus Wallin, Norman McLaren, Miranda July, Matthew Barney and Reynold Reynolds were screened at Impakt Festival, in addition to many others.
2010–present
Impakt Festival 2010
Matrix City focused on the various different perceptions of what elements constitute a city and what a city should look like. Considerations, not only on geographical matters, but additionally on Utopianism were addressed through the programme.
Impakt Festival 2011
2011 focused on the theme The Right to Know, in which Impakt dove into all dilemmas inherent in our modern data society, with conspiracy theories and cover-ups, digital dissidents and banned videos, data journalism and fear management, fine print messages and big secrets. The theme transpired to be extremely apt, as 2011 saw the onset of the Arab Spring and the prominence of WikiLeaks' rise.
The Centre for the Humanities (CfH) at Utrecht University, in collaboration with the department of New Media and Digital Culture and the Impakt Festival, initiated the CfH-Impakt Festival Fellowship. Mercedes Bunz acted as the festival fellow.
Impakt Festival 2012
No More Westerns explored the decline in dominance of Western media culture. The programme explored shifting geopolitical landscapes on the world stage and aimed to preview the imminent changes in visual culture. Guest curators included Samantha Culp and Cher Potter, they stated that: "We hope to share some of the isolated charges and momentary signs we’ve noticed that indicate a new and imminent awareness – a set of cultural and social movements emerging from regions operating along alternative storylines to the west, in the spaces between pre-modernism and postmodernism".
Speakers of note included Parmesh Shahani, along with another collaboration with The Centre for the Humanities (CfH) at Utrecht University.
Impakt Festival 2013
In 2013 the Impakt Festival investigated capitalism and the current economic crisis under the theme Capitalism: Catch-22 It asked questions, such as: whether capitalism is at the root of crises or actually the driving force behind progress? And, are there any viable alternatives?
Impakt selected three curatorial parties, representing a diverse programme: Amsterdam-based collective Monnik, British curator Benjamin Fallon and German film curator Florian Wüst.