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03.06.03 Impakt Festival 2003, political media art.
At the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, it's being held the 2003 edition of the Impakt Festival. 'Music, Fashion and Politics' is the theme of this year's edition, to stress the young artists' need to express themselves in the most different fields, highlighting a growing conscience for social and political issues. The attention towards new media, already manifest in the previous editions, continues with the 'Impakt Online' section, where six artists are sponsored to carry out their net.art projects. Among the topics discussed there are: 'The Art of the Narrative', with the works: 'Village Voice', by Ramesh Srinivasan, who once again investigates the mechanisms of oral tradition with a web interface able to merge different stories, taken from a database of stories told by somalian refugees in Boston, according to what the user is watching; 'Beadgee', by Tamar Schori, interleaves the visual meanings of a drawing with the textual meanings of words, in a process representing a different way to read. In the 'Out of the Box' section, on the other hand, there are: 'Life, A User's Manual: Impakt Walk', by Michelle Teran, where, while going around the city, the author highlights the hidden cameras behind walls and shop windows, and 'Songlines', by the GPSter, who use GPS receivers to find the data corresponding to real locations. 'Database Dilemma', finally, is still open to subscriptions. In the video programme, 'Blatant Plagiarism', by Derek Holzer, stands out. It deals with the antagonist use of sound sampling and copyright, a concept tackled also by the scheduled speech 'Creative Media Resistance', by Mark Hosler of Negativland and by the radical installations by Johan Grimonprez ('Inflight' and 'I'm a bit like you, I'm a bit in the clouds'). There's also a suitable space dedicated to electronic music, with an evening performances by the Mille Plateaux and concerts by Vladislav Delay, SND and Kid 606.