Accelerated Living // Performances

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In the context of the programme “Accelerated Living”, part of IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2009, 14-18 October 2009, Utrecht, NL. Preview here.

Wednesday 14 October 2009
Theater Kikker / 21:00

“We will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with the violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke.”
– F. T. Marinetti, ‘Futurist Manifest’

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Thomas Köner : The Futurist Manifest
The work of media artist Thomas Köner cannot be easily categorised. For years he was active as a sound engineer, before his project Porter Ricks caused a stir in the European techno landscape. In filmmaker Jurgen Reble he found the perfect collaborator to pursue his interest in the symbiosis of visual and auditive experiences. All these different influences come together in Köner’s recent work, in which his fascination for sound colour has expanded to the moving image, resulting in a series of acclaimed performances and installations. At the occasion of the festival theme of “Accelerated Living” and the hundredth anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto, he has composed an “opera digitale” for Impakt, which will be performed with a prepared piano, a digital ”noise orchestra” and a singer. The sonic sediments of one hundred years of industrialisation and acceleration will be condensed in a multidimensional audiovisual space, where image and sound interact as if “time and space died yesterday”.

Carl Faia: prepared piano & live electronics
Iris Garrelfs: voice & live electronics
Thomas Köner: laptop noise orchestra, visuals

An Impakt production

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Thursday 15 October 2009
Theater Kikker / 21:00

DOPES TO INFINITY

“I have something more cosmic in mind
It’s a warpage of time and it’s bliss for everyone”

– Monster Magnet

Time has this strange quality: it must be paced by events for us to be able to orient ourselves with it. This seems so natural that we don’t even regard our temporal relation to events as something that dictates how we structure meaning and position ourselves in this world, thinking instead of the space-time continuum as an ideal outside reality, unless – of course – the temporal orientation process is dismantled or overthrown in some way. The performances in this programme disrupt the structure, the pattern of time. Using analogue instruments, including 16mm projectors, these artists generate a variety of sensory manipulations, drawing and reflecting on psychological and phenomenological effects of speed, motion and repetition. On one level or another some disruption or displacement of conscious processes occurs, lapsing into unconscious and visceral sensations; a recirculation of orientation and perception. Time is collapsed – leaving us dazzled, between shimmer and bliss.

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Guy Sherwin

A key figure in British avant-garde cinema, Guy Sherwin (GB) pushes the limits of cinema with his films, installation works and performances, in which he explores film’s fundamental properties: light and time. Concerned with seriality and live intervention, his work investigates questions such as the physical relationships between sound and image, the digital re-working of film, the mechanisms of projection, the methods of printing and the live interaction between performer and film. Since the 1970s he has been working on a series of studies on the illusion of movement and stasis experienced during train travel. For Impakt, he will present a selection of his “train films” in the form of an expanded film performance.

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Dirk de Bruyn + Joel Stern
In his work, filmmaker and media artist Dirk de Bruyn (NL/AU) deals with the disorientating and traumatic experience of media saturated environments. A founding member and past president of MIMA (Experimenta), he has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation film and videos and interactive work over the last 30 years. He currently teaches Animation and Digital Culture at Deakin University in Melbourne. His performance ‘LanterNfanten’ for three projectors creates an absorbing space where time is disturbed and compressed as a kind of personal research on bodily trauma and cultural displacement, employing hand drawn, afterimage, single frame and flicker work. It will be accompanied by a live soundtrack from Brisbane based composer Joel Stern (AU), merging music concrète, art brut and noise.

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Core of the Coalman
Core of the Coalman is one of the alter egos of composer and visual artist Jorge Boehringer (US), a project in the musical no man’s land between power electronics, noise and contemporary classical music. With violin, his voice and electronics he builds sonic architectures hovering on the edge between chaos and order. Slow in form but powered and etched by sunshine continually, in the spirit of biting the hand that feeds one, Core of the Coalman is “dyspeptic subtended prescient lacuna”. He has collaborated with a spastic mash-up of the experimental music community and the international avant-garde, including Yellow Swans, Grouper and Pauline Oliveros.

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Bruce McClure
A film projector is not only a source of light but also of sound. Nobody understands this better than Bruce McClure (US) who with his immersive performances for multiple projectors creates a pure sensory game of pulsating rhythms and shadows, well beyond the borders of cinematographic time and space. McClure, an architect by training, “crossed over into the realm of the proto-cinematic as a consequence of trying to represent the beat of a metronome in time with the ultimate goal of laying down a line equal to the circumference of the earth at the equator. By recording the tempo and duration of his markings on paper he could calculate the distance travelled and what remained to complete a circumnavigation of the planet.” For Impakt he has prepared a unique two-hour performance, which is sure to provide a hypnotic and overwhelming experience.

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Friday 16 October 2009
Tivoli de Helling / 23:30

SPEED TRIBES

“It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.”
– Gilles Deleuze

The arrival of low-budget music technologies in the mid 1980s drastically altered the relational bonds between humans and machines in electronic music cultures. According to Kodwo Eshun “Atlantic Futurism is always building Futurythmachines, sensory technologies, instruments which renovate perception, which synthesize new states of mind”. The possibility of altering the speed of a record functioned as a key audio-technical transformation with wide-ranging subcultural impact. The bpm (beats per minute) metric, the operating grid of electronic dance music culture, acts as a filter whose fine-grained mesh distributes these audio populations. The sound system driven music cultures of the last two decades, especially in the UK, are populated with thousands of micro-scenes that have been deploying polyrhythmic attacks on this audio metric. Steve Goodman aka Kode9 calls these vertical rhythmic collectives “Speed Tribes”, collective bodies swarming around certain speeds of sound. This night is all about these ecologies of speed, “those molecular seepages and rhythmic infections which deviate from social segmentations.”

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Mount Kimbie + James Blake
British breakbeat culture is alive and kicking. The explosion of dubstep has provoked a plethora of sound experiments and cross-overs from which a fresh sound emerges from time to time. One of those surprises is London duo Mount Kimbie (GB) who inject melancholic pop sensibility and hybrid rhythmic patterns into dubstep. They are joined live by vocalist James Blake (GB) whose exciting debut reconciles jazz, soul and a taste for melodrama with the sound of the imploding metropolis.

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Cooly G
This protégé of the cutting edge Hyperdub label drew the attention of the so-called « UK funky » scene last year. It’s not surprising : her spicy but contagious mixture of deep house and dubstep, seasoned with bitter sweet vocals and subtle touches of acid and hardcore is, without a doubt, a fresh wind in the the British club culture. Tribal rhythms and woozy synth chords, deep basses and aching sighs, light vibes and dark undertones : it’s precisely these contrasts that make her music so irresistible!

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The Bug + Flowdan
The man behind The Bug is Kevin Martin (GB), who has been reinterpreting industrial, dub and breakbeat since the 1990s. His fascination for intense and dark mutations of electronic rhythms and sub-harmonic frequencies was already present in earlier projects such as God, Techno Animal and Ice. The Bug is the culmination of all these influences : a highly personal exploration of bass culture, with a sound that he self-described as “warped ragga meets heavy electronic dub”. His most recent release London Zoo was praised by several media as one of the most important albums of 2008. MC Flowdan (GB), a key figure of East London’s grime scene, will accompany The Bug as guest artist.

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Kode9
In recent years Steve Goodman aka Kode 9 (GB) has established himself as one of the most influential names in contemporary electronic music culture. A music producer, theorist and the owner of the celebrated Hyperdub label, he obstinately continues to explore the big city’s sonic fabric, its energy fields and rhythms. Movement, vibration, exaltation, emotion: Kode 9’s music acts like a hyper urban virus that mercilessly gets into our central nervous system.

+ DJ Sonido del Principe (Generation Bass)

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Saturday 17 October 2009
Theater Kikker / 21:00

ECSTATIC MUTATIONS

“Below the level of sounds and rhythms, music acts upon a primitive terrain, which is the physiological time of the listener. (…) Because of the internal organization of the musical work, the act of listening to it immobilizes passing time; it catches and enfolds it as one catches and enfolds a cloth flapping in the wind.”
– Claude Lévi-Strauss

As Lévi-Strauss suggested, music is registered throughout the body, it is not simply a matter of mental cognition. Compared to forms of visual communication, music possesses a visceral quality, relying for its effects not only on the neural registration of light waves but on the resonance of sound waves throughout the organs and the body tissues. It’s safe to say that music has a degree of materiality which other forms of communication – apart from physical touch – do not have. For Lévi-Strauss, music has something in common with myth in that they’re both “languages which, in their different ways transcend articulate expression, while at the same time requiring a temporal dimension in which to unfold. But this relation to time is of a rather special nature: it is as music and mythology needed time in order to deny it. Both, indeed, are instruments for the obliteration of time”. The acts in this programme explore rhythmic structures built of vibration and pitch, material expressions of raw movement of sound that tear us away from conventional time. Music as a pulsing line of flight, a surface affect expressed through rhythm.

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Thomas Brinkmann
Thomas Brinkmann (DE) is one of the foremost figures of the minimal techno movement, which has influenced contemporary music production since the 1990s. His fascination for programmatic and rhythmic structures finds its roots in his background as a drummer and his training as a visual artist, and most particularly in the influence of Minimalism’s principle of reduction. The result is a vast oeuvre of mathematically refined scores made of complex grooves, overtones and doppler effects. In Utrecht he will present for the first time a completely improvised « klick » performance with 8 turntables, a series of vinyl records and a knife.

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Arnold Dreyblatt Ensemble
The musical exploration of Dreyblatt (US), a student of the first generation of New York minimalist composers, is driven by an inclination for rhythmic complexity built on resonance and vibration. During the past decades he has developed a number of new instruments, tuning systems and performance techniques, with which he digs even deeper under the rhythmic surfaces in order to find a rich dynamics of textures and timbres. His work remained obscure for years, until it was brought to attention by musicians such as Jim O’Rourke who described one of his albums as “the first genuinely new sound in maybe 10 years”. He has recently brought together an ensemble with Jörg Hiller, Joachim Schutz and Robin Hayward, which will offer a rare not-to-be-missed concert during Impakt.

Arnold Dreyblatt: Composer, Excited Bass, Laptop
Jörg Hiller: Drums, Automated Electric Guitar
Joachim Schutz: Electric Guitar
Robin Hayward: Amplified Tuba

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Oren Ambarchi + Robbie Avenaim
Oren Ambachi (AU) uses the electro-acoustic transformation of his guitar as a laboratory for tonal research. The result is an abstract and fragile sound world that continuously searches the borders of time and space. He regularly collaborates with different musicians such as Fennesz, Keith Rowe en sunn0))). This time he will be reunited with his long-time friend percussionist Robbie Avenaim (AU), who explores the limits of the sound spectrum using modified and motorised drums. Together they create a visceral and kinetic audiovisual experience.

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SPECIAL EVENTS

“Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
– J.L. Borges

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Sunday 18 October 2009
Theater Kikker/ 15:00 – 18:00

Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez : Naldjorlak I, II, III by Eliane Radigue

The work of French composer Eliane Radigue (FR) is first and foremost an exploration of the phenomenological reality of sound : the combination of matter, vibration and resonance which ultimately determines our experience of sound. She began to experiment with electronic feedback in the 1950s, before discovering her medium of choice, the analogue ARP synthesizer. Since 2004 she has composed exclusively for acoustic instruments. ‘Naldjorlak I’, in which the hidden, complex sonority of the cello is fathomed, was developed as a collaboration with renowned cellist Charles Curtis (US). For the following parts, she required the participation of basset-horn players Carole Robinson (FR) and Bruno Martinez (FR). The result is a versatile and volatile sound world, which continuously balances on the verge of perception.

Charles Curtis: cello
Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez: basset horns

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Friday 16 October – Saturday 17 October 2009
Werfkelder / 21:00

Leif Inge : 9 Beet Stretch

There are few musical works that speak to the imagination as does Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. But although almost everyone in the Western world can easily hum its melody, this classic composition has not yet given away all its secrets. That’s what Norwegian artist Leif Inge does by digitally stretching out the piece to a length of 24 hours, unveiling its unknown and unheard dimensions. A marathon performance which is sure to provide a peculiar perception of time. In the words of a participant : “I thought I was a fly trapped in honey.”

Leif Inge’s (NO) monumental work in sound, 9 Beet Stretch has become emblematic of his work as an artist, even if it spreads across a great variety of forms, fields and crafts. Context and idea are given equal importance in an open play which emphasises the quality of bisociation rather than linear association; a play on the context and the definitions used to define it which functions as a cultural statement in such way that the resulting work is often hard to brand in one field rather than the other. Leif Inge’s work has been shown globally in venues like BizArt Art Center, Shanghai; Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico; Wien Modern, Vienna and Diapason Gallery, New York.

Special Thanks to: Dave Driesmans & Steve Marreyt (Kraak), Pim Verlaek (Impakt), Maurice Spijker (Mojo Music), Rebecca Prochnik (Elastic Artists).

Accelerated Living // Exhibition

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“All will be now. Dreams are too fast. You are the first. We are the last.
No sequence to follow. No fear of tomorrow. Kiss of neverness. Life of timelessness
We’ll break the speed of change. we’ll tame eternity.”

– The Pop group, ‘We Are Time’

We Are Time

In the context of the programme “Accelerated Living”, part of IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2009, 14-18 October 2009, Utrecht, NL. Preview here.

14-18 October, AAMU, Flatland Gallery, Academie Galerie

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.

ACADEMIEGALERIE

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Guido van der Werve
Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world

Timelapse photography, single channel HD video
2007

What happens when you take a day off, refusing to turn along with the world? One may think that such a day void of any motion and action has no consequences. Van der Werve took this question literally and left for the North Pole, where he spent 24 hours on the axis of the world. For one whole day he did not move along with Earth, but let the planet rotate around him. This almost Copernican inversion is both absurd and poetic, grotesque and moving. A tiny figure in the middle of a white icy plane, in a solitary fight against the tyranny of calendar calculations and the ticking of the clock.

Guido van der Werve (1977, Papendrecht, The Netherlands) constructs possible scenarios and imaginary realities where various geographies collide in order to generate momentary sensations of unusual, dream-like intensity. An accomplished classical pianist, composer, and chess player, he studied industrial design, archaeology, and Russian before focusing on fine art—first on painting, then performance work, and finally, film. He aims to create a visual and conceptual language that manifests a similar directness to the one that is typical in music. To date he has completed ten short film works that he describes as “possible scenarios of imaginary realities.” His work is regularly shown in international exhibitions and film festivals. In 2003 he received the René Coelho Award.

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Julieta Aranda
You Had No Ninth of May!

Various materials. Dimensions variable
2008

The work of Julieta Aranda challenges conventional notions of temporal experience, proposing alternatives to the rigidity with which time is conceived and measured. The primary source of inspiration for this installation is the International Date Line (IDL), an imaginary line on the globe that separates two consecutive calendar days, establishing the boundary between today and tomorrow. Although the precise location of IDL is not fixed by any international agreement, it is commonly identified as being 180° longitude from the Greenwich Meridian. The line crosses the Kiribati archipelago in the South Pacific, causing an aberration in our assumed time-space continuum.

Julieta Aranda (1975, Mexico City) received her MFA in 2006 from Columbia University in New York and her BFA on filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2001. Within her multimedia oeuvre, she has frequently focused on the dissemination of information and the agency of the individual in contemporary society, reinventing existing systems of commerce and circulation to generate “alternative transactions of cultural capital”. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as The Kitchen, New York; 10th Lyon Biennial; Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York; Transmediale08, Berlin; 2nd Moscow Biennial, 2007; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and many others.

Thanks to Sebastian Schumacher

FLATLAND GALLERY

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Vadim Fishkin
A Speedy Day

Electronic clock, light installation, room construction. Light Design: AJ Weissbard
2003-2009

A light installation that compresses an entire day (24h) into 2.5 minutes: the experience of a day passing as if we were in a space rocket travelling away from Earth at a velocity of 299,782 (only 10 km/sec slower than the speed of light). A homage to Albert Einstein and his “twins paradox”, a thought experiment in special relativity involving a couple of twins that demonstrates that if one of them set out on a journey into space and back, they would no longer be the same age, and yet neither would be younger. The installation becomes an isolation cell where we let go of our conventional sense of time.

Vadim Fishkin (1965, Penza, USSR) has been living and working in Ljubljana since 1992. His work is principally concerned with science and its specific rules or phenomena, whether gravity (Kaplegraf_Zero_G, 2003), meteorology (Changing the Climate, 2004), astronomy (Am I a Star?, 2004), or botany (Self-Portrait, 1997). But the artist’s science is quite unrealistic, strange, and witty. It is not concerned with the seriousness of the scientific method or approach, but rather with the craziness that lies within a dangerous experiment. His work has been shown internationally in venues such as the 46th, 50th, and the 51st Venice Biennales, the 1st Valencia Biennial, the 1st Manifesta, the 3rd Istanbul Biennial, and the 8th Baltic Biennial, among others.

Thanks to Gregor Podnar Gallery

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Jonas Dahlberg
Three Rooms

3 channel video installation on 46 inch monitors
2008

Three different rooms (living room, dining room and bedroom) with similar everyday furniture are shown on three screens. During the course of 26 minutes the objects in the rooms dissolve, leaving only the lighting and the bare space. Time seems to unfold at a pace that is both slow and infinitely fast: the gradual process of disappearance takes place at a slower rate than we normally associate with movement and destruction, but we also experience it as an acceleration of biological and geological time. We feel the natural force that inevitably leads towards the erosion and dissolution of all forms. What remains is a desolation beyond subjectivity.

Jonas Dahlberg (1970, Uddevalla, Sweden) often engages architectural precision and an investigative approach in his work, while always contemplating on the aesthetics of space, light and existence. Dahlberg builds meticulous architectural models of public environments or private interiors that he also employs as film sets for his videos – allowing the viewer to be at the same time inside and outside of the centre of the mise-en-scène. After studying architecture and art history in Lund and Gothenburg, Dahlberg received his MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2000. His work has been shown at the Busan Biennial, South Korea; the Santa Monica Museum of Modern Art, California; Kunsthalle Wien; Art Basel; the 50th Venice Biennal; Centre pour l’image contemporaine, Geneva; among many others.

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AAMU

Glenn Kaino
Quarter Mile

3 channel video installation on 50 inch monitors
2007

The most recent installation in Glenn Kaino’s ‘Time Machines’ series is a cinematographic triptych displaying the journey of three characters each travelling the distance of a quarter mile (=400 metres) in their own environment: jazz musician Olu Dara, beach volleyball player Sinjin Smith and Formula D racer Kenji Yamanaka. The sequences are synchronized so they all take the same time, in spite of their original speed. Every action is repeated several times, always at a different rhythm. The movement of each character is essentially bound to the performances of the other two, challenging our relationship to time, distance and speed.

Cofounder of Los Angeles’ artist-run Deep River Gallery, former Creative Director of Napster and creator of ueber.com, a MySpace alternative made for and by artists, Los Angeles-based artist Glenn Kaino (1970, LA, USA) has a multifaceted creative practice, characterised by playfulness and a penchant for meditating on political, pop-cultural and identity issues without being literal. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Irvine and his M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. Kaino’s work has been shown at the Asia Society, New York; Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; The Studio Museum, New York; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

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Guy Sherwin
Clock Screen

16 mm projector, film loop, clock, paper screen
2007-2009

A time-lapse film with images of the shifting sunlight is projected onto a small rotating screen attached to the hand of a clock. The shaft of sunlight changes its shape as a result of Earth and screen revolving. It creates an unexpected dynamics between the abstract, socially constructed clock-time, the natural cycle of Earth’s rotation and the temporality of film medium, resulting in a meditation on the complexity of our experience of time.

Guy Sherwin (1948, London, England) pushes the limits of cinema with his films, installation works and performances, in which he explores film’s fundamental properties: light and time. After studying painting at the Chelsea School of Art in the late 1960’s, Sherwin taught printing and processing at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op during the mid-70s, at the heyday of the British Structural Film Movement. He now teaches at Middlesex University and University of Wolverhampton, and collaborates on expanded cinema performances with his partner, Singaporean film and sound artist Lynn Loo. His films have been widely exhibited in England and abroad. Solo shows include San Francisco Cinematheque, LUX London, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Bozar Brussels and Image Forum Tokyo.

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Thomson & Craighead
Horizon

Video installation, Internet connection
2008

A narrative clock made out of images extracted in real time from webcams found in every time zone around the world. The result is a constantly changing array of images that read like a series of movie storyboards, but also as an idiosyncratic electronic sundial. This installation pinpoints the tension between local time and the Internet’s global time regime. In spite of the attempts to introduce an online standard time, natural and cultural time differences cannot be ignored.

Jon Thomson (1969, London, England) and Alison Craighead (1971, Aberdeen, Scotland) are London-based visual artists, who work with video, sound and the internet. Much of their work to date explores how technology changes the way we perceive the world around us. They use live data to make artworks, including “template cinema online artworks” and gallery installations, where networked movies are created in real time from online material such as remote-user security web cams, audio feeds and chat room text transcripts. Their work has been shown at Tate Britain; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SFMOMA; Laboral, Gijon, Spain; Zentrum Kunst Media ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; The New Museum, New York; Mejanlabs, Stockholm; Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase, New York.

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URBAN SCREENS

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Theater Kikker

Mark Formanek & Datenstrudel
Standard Time

Single channel HD video
2007

The recording of a performance in which 70 workers assemble and reassemble a 4 x 12 m wooden replica of a “digital” clock that displays the “real” time: a task that involves 1611 changes over a 24-hour period. This installation offers an ironic comment on the tension between labour, technology and temporality. What better way to waste time than by marking its passage?

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City Hall

Thorsten Fleisch
Dromosphere

Single channel HD video
2009

A research on the representation of four dimensional spacetime – described by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity – led to the making of this audiovisual sculpture of speed. Using a scale model of a sports car and a dolly synchronised to the shutter of the camera, Fleisch has produced a capturing visualisation of the phenomenon of speed, with playful references to Paul Virilio and Jeremy Clarkson.

Accelerated Living // Screenings

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ACCELERATED LIVING

SCREENINGS

In the context of the programme “Accelerated Living”, part of IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2009, 14-18 October 2009, Utrecht, NL. Preview here.

All screenings @ Filmtheater ‘t Hoogt

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 information stimuli, 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 influence 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.

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As Time Goes By
Friday 16 October, 13:00 Film Theater ’t Hoogt, Hall 1

There is in the world a great and yet ordinary secret. All of us are part of it, everyone is aware of it, but very few ever think of it. Most of us just accept it and never wonder over it. This secret is time.
— Michael Ende

In his book The Psychology of Time French psychologist Paul Fraisse claims that we are only aware of time when it appears distorted. We have no experience of time as such, according to Fraisse, only of specific sequences and rhythms. It is not time itself but what goes on in time that produces temporal effects. In this sense, Cinema – the sculpting of time – is the medium best fit to penetrate its mysteries. The films and videos in this programme use the plasticity of the moving image and the inherent dialectics between the continuous and the instantaneous in order to explore the tensions between the time of watching, the image’s own time and the existential dimension of time.

Morten Skallerud, A Year Along the Abandoned Road
Norway 1991, 35mm, 12:00 min

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A portrait of a deserted fishing village in Northern Norway and a journey through time and space: the four seasons unfold in a continuous camera movement through the village of Børfjord. This 12 minute short film was filmed in 70mm Super Panavision, using a specially developed “nature animation” technique. The result is a magic flight in one single shot, along the remains of a village road. At the same time a whole year passes by at 50.000 times normal speed!

Kurt Kren, 31/75 Asyl
Austria 1975, 16mm, 9:00 min, mute

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Recorded over the space of 21 days by selectively masking and exposing the same three rolls of film, the transformations of a landscape are simultaneously recorded in a static image. Peter Weibel coins this methodology “temporally extended multiple lighting”. “Since the weather was changing throughout the time of shooting (March/April) the brightness of the picture is very different from take to take. Sometimes snow is seen on the ground… The exchange of the masks does create movement, but not as a course of time towards a goal.” (Birgit Hein)

Gary Beydler, Venice Pier
United States 1976, 16mm, 16:00 min

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“I wanted to make a film that was exactly one year in the making. I love the ocean, and I decided to shoot on the Venice Pier, which was about a quarter mile long. About every ten feet, there are divisions in the pier, which I decided to use as the shooting points. I started shooting maybe in November or December, and shot it all the way through to the following year, finishing on the same date. Watching the film, you’re moving forward every so slowly, through different times, different seasons, different situations. Sometimes you get the feeling of movement, sometimes you don’t. No need for staging, I just shot things that were happening.” (GB)

Rose Lowder, Bouquets 1-10
France 1994-95, 16mm, 11:00, mute

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Bouquets 1-10 is Lowder’s first collection in an ongoing series of one minute episodes, each composed of footage shot around a general geographic location that has been alternately woven, frame by frame, into a single film reel and connected through the interstitial still life image of a flower that cues the beginning of each integrated film Bouquet. Each bouquet of flowers is also a bouquet of frames mingling the plants to be found in a given place with the activities that happen to be there at the time. Lowder uses the film strip as a canvas with the freedom to film frames on any part of the strip in any order, running the film through the camera as many times as needed.

Joost Rekveld, #3
Netherlands 1994, 16mm, 4:00 min, mute

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#3 is a film with pure light, in which the images were created by recording the movements of a tiny light-source with extremely long exposures, so that it draws traces on the emulsion. The light is part of a simple mechanical system that exhibits chaotic behaviour. The film was made according to an extensive score covering colour, exposure, camera position, width of the light-trail and the direction and speed of movement of the mechanical system. The light that draws the traces was fastened to a double pendulum. This system is known from chaos-theory and shows unpredictable behaviour in a certain range of speeds.” (JR)

William Raban, Broadwalk
United Kingdom 1972, 16mm, 4:00 min

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“Originally, this was a four-minute time-lapse film which was shot continuously over a twenty-four hour period. The camera was positioned on a busy pathway in Regent’s Park, and recorded three frames a minute. The shutter was held open for the twenty-second duration between exposures, so that on projection, individual frames merge together making the patterned flows of human movement clearly perceptible. The time-lapse original was then expanded by various processes of refilming to reveal the frame-by-frame structure of the original.” (WR)

Guy Sherwin, Clock & Candle, Metronome, Barn Door (from the Short Film Series)
United Kingdom 1975-1998, 16 mm, 9:00 min, mute

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It is quite impossible to offer a definitive description of Guy Sherwin’s Short Film Series, since it has no beginning, middle or end. Composed of a series of three minute (100ft.) sections which can be projected in any order, the series is open-ended and ongoing. The ideas of film as a record of life and the camera apparatus as a ‘clock’ which actually marks ‘time’ are present throughout the series. Many parts deal with two rates of time measurement, as in Clock and Candle, or construct visual paradoxes, as in the shuddering stasis of Metronome – an illusion caused by the clash between the spring-wound mechanisms of the Bolex camera and of the metronome itself. In Barn Door the semi-strobe effect of light pulsations flattens the distant landscape.

Michael Snow, See You Later / Au Revoir
Canada 1990, 16mm, 18:00 min


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A simple plot: Michael Snow as a “Walking Man”, leaving his office in extreme slow motion. In a single panning shot thirty seconds of real-time action are distended to eighteen minutes by means of a high speed video camera then step printing the video onto film. Filming on video saturates the color, bringing a luxuriant richness to the work, which retains the simple conception of Snow’s earlier films and once again highlights cinematic duration. With See You Later Snow continues his exploration of the ways in which technology enhances our ability to perceive, live in and experience the world.

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Chronoschisms
Friday 16 October, 15:00, Film Theater ‘T Hoogt, Hall 1

’The movie projector’s a kind of clock’, Ed Bachelor said. Somewhere inside the machine beats a Piranesi space, shaped and given dimension by a string of exposures of a seated woman undulating gravity-free. Who is the alluring lady of this filmstrip tease? I call her Dinah, because the name contains a D, an N, and an A.
— Ken Jacobs

Modern cinema is a reflection of the rationalization and standardisation of time. The amazement caused more than a century ago by the possibility of recording and analyzing movement has given way to an obsession with imitating “real time”. The certainties of progress and predictability, the two pillars of capitalist modernity, have also shaped the construction of cinematographic time. This programme features a selection of works that subvert the mimetic function of audiovisual media, and intervene – via mechanisms of variation and repetition – in the epistemological process of fragmentation that constitutes the basis of the conventional cinematographic vision.

Fred Worden, Throbs
United States 1972, 16mm, 7:00 min

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Found footage of circuses, fairgrounds and car crashes is repeated, distorted and layered, brought to the point of destruction and then back again, recoalescing to a hypnotic, looping and crescendoing soundtrack. Frequently employing an optical printer for his projects, Worden’s investigations involve subtle explorations of light, texture, colour, exposure, detail, and the other physical qualities of celluloid, emulsion, and the light that must pass through it. In Throbs unusually beautiful clashes of colour and shape occur a result of Worden’s creative manipulation of time and use of superimpositions.

Malcolm Le Grice, Berlin Horse
United Kingdom 1970, 16mm, 9:00 min

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“This film is largely filmed with an exploration of the film medium in certain aspects. It is also concerned with making certain conceptions about time in a more illusory way than I have been inclined to explore in many other of my films. It attempts to deal with some of the paradoxes of the relationships of the “real” time which exists when the film was being shot, with the “real” time which exists when the film is being screened, and how this can be modulated by technical manipulation of the images and sequences. The film is in two parts joined by a central superimposition of the material from both parts.” (MLG) The soundtrack was supplied by Brian Eno who at the time was exploring, in sound, a similar use of loops that changed their phase shift.

Chris Garrat, Versailles
United Kingdom 1976, 16mm, 11:00 min

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”For this film I made a contact printing box, with a printing area 16mm x 185mm which enabled the printing of 24 frames of picture plus optical sound area at one time. The first part is a composition using 7 x 1-second shots of the statues of Versailles, Palace of 1000 Beauties, with accompanying soundtrack, woven according to a pre-determined sequence. Because sound and picture were printed simultaneously, the minute inconsistencies in exposure times resulted in rhythmic fluctuations of picture density and levels of sound. Two of these shots comprise the second part of the film which is framed by abstract imagery printed across the entire width of the film surface: the visible image is also the sound image.” (CG)

Iván Zulueta, Frank Stein
Spain 1972, 16mm, 3:00 min

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Filmed before Arrebato, Zulueta’s Frank Stein is a very personal reading of horror cult classic Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), filmed directly from its television broadcast and reducing Whale’s original to only three packed and dizzying minutes, during which the intimate monster evolves at an unusual rate. A game of rhythm and tempo which Zulueta will continue to explore in a series of super 8 short films such as King Kong, Mi ego está en babia, A malgam A and El mensaje es facial.

Joyce Wieland, Handtinting 

Canada 1967-68, 16mm, 6:00 min, mute

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“This film is composed of cut-away shots that Wieland filmed for a proposed documentary on a West Virginia job training center. Wieland dyed this leftover footage, added flashes of other footage, and scratched and perforated the film itself with her sewing needles. Recent allusions to Handtinting incorporate into feminist critical discussion the importance of tools and methods of working particular to women’s crafts. The movie is comprised of looped and reversed images of the girls dancing, swimming, and talking so that a repetitive or loop effect results in actions that recur but are never completed. Their incomplete movements and gestures become isolated rhythms of social rituals. Lacking spatial depth and temporal completion, the repetitive actions negate the illusion of solid space in documentary cinema.” (Lauren Rabinovitz)

Bruce Conner, Marilyn Times Five
United States 1972, 16mm, 10:00 min

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Out of fifty feet of footage from a girlie 1950s movie (Apple Knockers and the Coke, featuring Arline Hunter, an actress who clearly attempts to impersonate Monroe), Conner has conjured an allegory of the human cycle of birth and death. He breaks up the tenuous continuity of the original production by reordering poses and distending certain movements via looped repetition or a form of progressive looping in which one movement begins in one shot, is incrementally advanced in the next shot, and so on. Five individual sequences are build around a lush recording of ‘I’m through with Love’; each successive permutation displays pieces of previously unseen footage interrupted by passages of black leader. Conner’s intent, in his own words, “was to take some parts of the found footage and rearrange them to see if the quintessential ‘Marilyn’ could emerge”.

Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Water Pulu 1869 1896
Croatia (SFRY) 1987-88, 16mm, 9:00 min

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In Water Pulu we see a game of water polo. The cameras keep the ball in the middle of the picture (an effect achieved by multiple exposure, copying and manipulations on the optical bench). It becomes the sun around which the human activities revolve. The first movement from Debussy’s La Mer and the noise of the game, which is mixed with the song of the dolphins, refer to water as the essential element for life. An ingenious system of number symbolism governing the order of images and cuts, and references to the significance of sun and water in culture and art place this film in the context of timeless human self-reflection. “Galeta hides a true chamber of wonders behind the clear, mathematically abstract structure of his films and videos, meticulously compiled rhythmically frame for frame, each work likewise presenting an analysis of the film medium.” (Georg Schöllhammer).

Ken Jacobs, What Happened On 23rd Street In 1901
United States 2009, video, 13:00 min, mute

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“It was a set-up. A couple walks towards the camera, a sidewalk air-vent pushes the woman’s dress up. Layers of cloth billow and she is mortified. The moving picture camera, already in place and grinding away, captures the event and her consternation becomes history, now transferred to digital and shown everywhere. In this cine-reassessment, the action is simultaneously both speeded up and slowed down. How can that be? Overall progression is prolonged, so that a minute of recorded life-action takes ten minutes now to pass onscreen. Slow-motion, yes? No. Instead, the street action meets with a need to see more, and there descends upon the event a sudden storm of investigative technique in the form of rapid churning of film frames, looping of the tiny time-intervals that make up events. Black intervals enter and Eternalisms come into play meaning that directional movements continue in their directions without moving, potentially forever.” (KJ)

Rafael Montañez Ortiz, Dance n° 22
United States 1993, video, 10:00 min

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“In my video work, I seek to suspend time, to magnify beyond all proportion the fantasy, dream, or nightmare I glimpse in even the most realistic straightforward documentary footage, in even the most innocent storyline.” (RMO). In this video Montañez Ortiz rechoreographs a scene from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera by stuttered editing. The original, as we know it, is a love of anarchy. What Montañez Ortiz achieves here is sheer madness; the walls literally vibrate. “In an ongoing dance series, [Ortiz] has used this [editing] technique to explore the rhythmic undertones in social interactions, often fights among men. Ortiz describes the overall effect as a “holographic” space within the Hollywood text, yet outside the familiar perceptual mode and linear structure of mass media.” (Chon Noriega)

Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Mosaik Mécanique
Austria 2007, 35mm, 9:30 min

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The third part of Pfaffenbichler’s ‘Notes on Film’ series, which borrows its title from a combination of Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mécanique and Peter Kubelka’s Mosaik in Vertrauen. All the shots of the slapstick comedy A Film Johnnie (USA, 1914) are shown simultaneously in a symmetrical grid, one after the other. Each scene, from one cut to the next, from the first to the last frame, is looped. Spatialisation takes the place of temporality, synchronism that of chronology. A polyrhythmic kaleidoscope is produced as a result (reflected in Bernhard Lang’s music), tearing the audience back and forth between an analytic way of seeing rhythmic patterns and the impulse to (re)construct a plot.

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Place Over Time
Friday 16 October, 17:00, Film Theater ‘t Hoogt, Hall 1

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

This programme brings together a number of works focusing on landscapes, as meditative time capsules in which different events unfold, activating the potential pasts of a place. Whereas the landscapes of narrative cinema are often latent expressionistic theatres, echoing the minds of the human figures within them, these films fully focus the attention on the rhythms of the natural world, from the microscopic to the cosmological. The only signs of human life are the traces of destruction left behind by our urge to move faster across time and space. Virilio argues: “it is no longer God the Father who dies, but the Earth, the Mother of living creatures since the dawn of time. With light and the speed of light, it is the whole of matter that is exterminated”.

Emily Richardson, Cobra Mist
United Kingdom 2008, 35mm, 7:00 min

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Cobra Mist explores the relationship between the landscape of Orford Ness in Suffolk and the traces of its unusual military history, particularly the experiments in radar and the extraordinary architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. The place has a sinister atmosphere, which the architecture itself begins to reveal and the sense of foreboding is accentuated via the film’s soundtrack by Benedict Drew. “The film cuts between stillness and activity through time-lapse, a sweeping camera and changing light. The sound also cuts between birdsong and industrial noises suggesting activity when onscreen there is non.” (William Fowler).

Chris Welsby, Sky Light
United Kingdom 1988, 16mm, 26:00 min

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Sky Light is a single screen version of the 6-projector installation with the same title. “An idyllic river through a forest, flashes of light and colour threaten to erase the image, bursts of short wave and static invade the tranquillity of the natural sound. The camera searches amongst the craggy rocks and ruined buildings of a bleak and windswept snowscape, a Geiger counter chatters ominously in the background. The sky is overcast at first but gradually clears to reveal a sky of unnatural cobalt blue. This film was made in response to some very strong feelings experienced at the time of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.” (CW)

Jeanne Liotta, Observando el Cielo
United States 2007, 16mm, 19:00 min

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“Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth. This work is neither a metaphor nor a symbol, but is feeling towards a fact in the midst of perception, which time flows through. Natural VLF radio recordings of the magnetosphere in action allow the universe to speak for itself. The Sublime is Now. Amor Fati!”. (JL) Soundtrack by Peggy Ahwesh, with recordings by Ahwesh, Liotta, Mailie Colbert, Barbara Ess and Radio Guitar.

Peter Hutton, Time and Tide
United States 2000, 16mm, 35:00, mute

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The first section of the film is a reprint of a reel shot by Billy Bitzer in 1903 titled Down the Hudson for Biograph. It chronicles in single frame time lapse a section of the river between Newburgh and Yonkers. The second section of the film was shot by filmmaker Peter Hutton and records fragments of several trips up and down the Hudson River between Bayonne (NJ and Albany (NY). The filmmaker was travelling on the tugboat “Gotham” as it pushed (up river) and pulled (down river) the Noel Cutler, a barge filled with 35,000 barrels of unleaded gasoline. “Combining the luminescence and formal contemplation of the Hudson Valley painters with documentary and ecological concerns, Time and Tide extends the panoramic field of Hutton’s previous Portrait of a River. And after decades of an exclusive devotion to and mastery of reversal black and white stocks, Time and Tide marks Hutton’s inaugural foray into color negative.” (Mark McElhatten)

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Terminal Velocity
Friday 16 October, 21:00, Film Theater ’t Hoogt, Hall 2

With the fantastic illustration of the dromosphere of the speed of light in a vacuum, we are at least to question the witnesses, those of Chernobyl, for instance, for in 1986 the time of the accident suddenly became for them, and finally for all of us, the ‘accident in time’.
— Paul Virilio

Chernobyl has irremediably infected our perception of time. A few seconds: that’s all it took to lose control of the reactor. There wasn’t any more time for those who were exposed to a fatal dose of radioactivity. The explosion was only visible for a moment, but seemed to last for an eternity. In only a few days the radioactive cloud flew all over the world, infecting a great number of people. But it will take several millennia until the released radioactive isotopes are completely neutralised. This selection considers the rise of the nuclear threat after 1945 and the application of the technological principles of mass production to mass destruction.

Leslie Thornton, Let Me Count the Ways : Minus 10, 9, 8, 7
United States 2004, video, 22:00 min

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Let Me Count the Ways is a series of meditations on violence and fear, and their reverberations on cultural history. The episodes have been built out of a mixture of personal reflections and diverse image material which present the phenomenology of fear with an intensity that breaks abruptly the border between past and present. Just as in earlier work, Thornton explores the social effects of new technologies and media, but here she goes deeper into autobiographical territory, suggesting we are all involved in these developments. “I want to spark the imagination into sensing something of a past, while at the same time giving a place for the images to have a full, awesome present. Not to privilege the past, but to experience wonder that it exists, like looking at stars.”(LT)

Pavel Medvedev, On the Third Planet from the Sun
Russia 2006, 35mm, 32:00 min

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A portrait of life in the Arkhangelsk area near the Arctic Circle in Northern Russia, where the Soviet army carried out tests of the hydrogen bomb in 1961. The local Pomors still live the way they have for centuries; preoccupied with fishing, hunting and growing plants. But the nearby rocket launching site has brought with it a new type of hunt, the hunt for “space garbage” which they sell as scrap iron or to use in housekeeping and farming. Medvedev delivers a striking visual exploration of environmental destruction and the rebirth of a community.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Atomic Park
France 2003, 35mm, 8:00 min

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Shot on location at White Sands, New Mexico, very near Trinity Site – the location of the first atomic explosion in July 1945 – Atomic Park captures sunbathers and tourists taking in the striking sun: the place is now home to a recreation area as well as a military base for research. The film presents a national park, a white desert, a natural exhibition space where each presence, each movement can give way to different interpretations and to a new reading of the setting. On the soundtrack we hear faintly the voice of Marilyn Monroe in her desperate and accusatory monologue about manly violence in The Misfits (1961). Partially obscured by a degree of over-exposure, Atomic Park evokes the contradictory experiences of leisure and danger.

Bruce Conner, Crossroads
United States 1976, 35mm, 36:00 min

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“From material recently declassified by the Defense Department, Conner has constructed a 36-minute work, editing together 27 different takes of the early atomic explosions at Bikini, all un-altered found footage in its original black and white. The film is without dialogue or descriptive factual detail. It consists simply of the visual record of these first bombs’ destructive capability. In his researching, Conner uncovered a vivid historical account of the Bikini tests written for the Joint Task Force (Army and Navy) by W. A. Shurcliff. Interestingly, what one would expect to be a dry, methodical description is in fact dramatic and fascinating, revealing how impossible it was to suppress the bomb’s overwhelming power. This original state of consciousness is what Conner wants us to re-experience in his film. What were the circumstances surrounding these tests, as described by Shurcliff?” (William Moritz & Beverly O’Neill, 1978). Music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.

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Rush Hour
Saturday 17 October, 13:00, Film Theater ‘t Hoogt, Hall 1

I love my syncopated city. This is my fascinating rhythm
I need my syncopated city. I love my sense of dislocation

— London Elektricity

The city is the place where the forces and fruits of modernity meet: capitalist enterprise, mechanised industrialisation, the movement of anonymous crowds and fast vehicles, kaleidoscopic shopping windows for all tastes and colours. “A city made for speed is made for success” wrote Le Corbusier in 1920. This influential architect saw in speed and urban planning the keys to better living conditions, but failed to take into account the fundamental ambiguities of modern urban living: the simultaneous feeling of agitation and stress, opportunism and nonchalance, order and chaos. This contradiction appears to be the city’s essence. This is the central idea behind this screenings programme, in which urban surroundings are observed, dissected and transformed into matrices of energy and rhythm, surfaces and patterns, colour and design.

D.A. Pennebaker, Daybreak Express
United States 1958, 35mm, 6:00 min

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“A short film for those with a short attention span”. A five-minute portrait of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway in New York City set to Duke Ellington’s music. A simple composition of city images in 1950s, the directorial debut of D.A. Pennebaker – one of the fathers of American “direct cinema” – is an extraordinary experiment in using the camera in travelling motion. “I wanted to make a film about this filthy, noisy train and its packed-in passengers that would look beautiful, like the New York City paintings of John Sloan, and I wanted it to go with one of my Duke Ellington records, ‘Daybreak Express’.” (DAP)

Marie Menken, Go! Go! Go!
United States 1964, 16mm, 12:00 min, mute

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“Taken from a moving vehicle, for much of the footage. The rest uses stationary frame, stop-motion. In the harbor sequence, I had to wait for the right amount of activity, to show effectively the boats darting about; some sequences took over an hour to shoot, and last perhaps a minute on the screen. The “strength and health” sequence was shot at a body beautiful convention. Various parts of the city of New York, the busy man’s engrossment in his busy-ness, make up the major part of the film … a tour-de-force on man’s activities (…) My major film, showing the restlessness of human nature and what it is striving for, plus the ridiculousness of its desires”. (MM)

Gordon Matta-Clark, City Slivers
United States 1976, 16mm, 14:00 min, mute

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A formal investigation of New York’s urban architecture, it was planned to be projected on the exterior facade of a building. Employing mattes to segment the film frame into narrow vertical bands that readily accommodate the proportions of Manhattan’s high-rise skyline, Matta-Clark creates a dynamic city symphony. The visual slivers capture both the monumentality of the built environment and the hectic fragmented pace of urban life as traffic and pedestrians traverse intersections, workers enter and exit a revolving door, and diaristic texts appear running along the edges of the frame. “Time is fluid, again, as slivers of scenes overlap in rhapsodic simultaneity.” (Steve Jenkins)

Yo Ota, Incorrect Intermittence
Japan, 2000, 16mm, 6:00 min

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“This film offers a metacinematic study of tempo and change and a figure of velocity. It consists of three interrelated parts or scenes that are unified by three different locations in Tokyo: a railway crossing, a shopping street, and a temple. In Ota’s experiment, editing is not the primary tool, yet it shows the emphasized rhythm of a montage film. To obtain this paradox of continuity, duration, change, and speed, Ota recorded each location at the interval of hours, and sometimes even days, by using different filters and by alternating the camera speed. The result mirrors aspects of both duration and speed while using real time as an editing tool. It represents an inquiry into the abstract space-time of cinema where Ota plays with the physical fact that time is a ‘function of movement in space’.” (Malin Wahlberg)

Nicolas Rey, Terminus For You
France, 1996, 16mm, 10:00 min

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“Rey’s film uses a simple, classic trope of contemporary urban life: the moving walkway at the subway station becomes a dual symbol, an evocation of the human condition in the industrial world, as well as a metaphor for the workings of the most representative of the era’s art forms: the cinema. Like the film loop, the walkway circles endlessly, yet its visible portion, shadowing the human walk, offers an illusion of linear progression, transporting human bodies from A to B with the smooth lateral movement of a traveling shot, and the pre-determined direction and calculated time of an endlessly repeated scenario. (…) Urban life’s mechanical rhythms continue to provide an artificial sense of continuity, direction and purpose where fragmentation and senselessness reign.” (Martine Beugnet)

Jim Jennings, Public Domain
United States 2008, 16mm, 8:00 min, mute

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In a career that spans over three decades, Jim Jennings’ lyrical sensibility has thoroughly captured the environs of New York from its bridges, trellises, and elevated subway lines to the closely observed nuances of fellow New Yorkers. “The film’s title was a response to the debate in New York over the City’s plan to require licensing and insurance from filmmakers to film on the street, in the public realm. Fortunately, the City backed down. In its whirling color, this film expresses my never-ending fascination with the street.” (Jim Jennings)

Dryden Goodwin, Hold
United Kingdom 1996, video, 5:00 min

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People observed in the street are a frequent subject in Dryden Goodwin’s films, drawings and installations. His video Hold considers the nature of memory, exploring the tension between our desire to hold onto experiences against the inevitability of the passing of time. A recollection of all the people seen through a day, Hold exploits the fact that film is made up of separate frames; it features a new person on practically every frame, or every eighteenth of a second. Although occasionally two or three people are held longer, using consecutive frames to jump back and forth between them, the sound and the mechanism of the film are relentless, no resolution is reached, we continue to move forward.

Michel Pavlou, Interstices
Greece/Norway, 2009, video, 3:00 min

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A series of scenes shot in the Paris metro, edited to the rhythm of the trains’ automatic doors. The kaleidoscopic effect of viewing through the windows of trains as they pass each other determines the geometry of the image. A composition of parallel and divergent vertical and horizontal movements: those of the camera but also of the trains and the scrolling publicity panels. Everyday traffic and urban rush are recurring themes in the work of Michel Pavlou, concerned with the investigation of film’s primary dimension: time. His films and videos move in the interstices of time and space, addressing the tensions between static and dynamic, present and absent, revelation and concealment.

Mark Lewis, Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside
Canada 2005, 35mm to HD video, 4:00 min, mute

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Shadows of pedestrians during morning and evening rush hour at a major urban intersection. Scenes of people scurrying to and fro, captured from a very different perspective: Only their shadows appear to collide randomly. Everyone is hurrying to work. And subsequently to their homes. Shot in London’s financial district, Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside is an attempt by Canadian filmmaker-artist Mark Lewis to capture the urban fabric.

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Fast Lane
Saturday 17 October, 15:00, Film Theater ’t Hoogt, Hall 1

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. (…) When man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed. A curious alliance: the cold impersonality of technology with all the flames of ecstasy.
— Milan Kundera

Belgian speed racer Camille Jenatzy was the first man to break the 100 km/h barrier in 1899. The car he entered History with was called “La Jamais Contente”. Never satisfied: modernity in a nutshell. The insatiable hunger for machine speed, as the motor for progress, but also as a sensuous experience, is the central theme of this programme. The arrival of trains, cars, airplanes and space shuttles changed irrevocably the relationship between time and space. It increased the speed with which bodies could move across space and dramatically shortened the time involved. But this increase of speed brings along contradictions, paradoxes and dangers….

Guy Sherwin, Rallentando
United Kingdom 2000, 16mm, 9:00 min

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Accelerating and decelerating rhythms taken from a train as it enters a station. Sound is adapted from Honneger’s orchestral work ‘Pacific 231’. Rallentando is part of Sherwin’s Train Films, which he will present during Impakt in the form of a film performance (see ‘Dopes to Infinity’). Inspired by the movements and parallax effects of objects appearing to cross each other when viewed from a moving train, as well as by the parallels between film form and train journeys, these films have titles which denote specific musical forms; Canon, Stretto, or instructions; Da Capo, Rallentando.

Gerard Holthuis, Hong Kong (HKG)
Netherlands 1999, 35mm, 13:00 min

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The city of Hong Kong is often seen as a living example of the Virilian notion of ‘speed’. “Change takes place in present-day Hong Kong in ways that do not merely disturb our sense of time but completely upset and reverse it. (…) It suggest[s] a space traversed by different times and speeds”. (Ackbar Abbas). In 1998 Kai Tak airport in the middle of Hong Kong was closed. Approaching Kai Tak was a unique experience for the passengers . «One could read the newspapers in the street» one passenger exclaimed. In Hong Kong (HKG) Holthuis films the approach and the passing by of the airplanes in the middle of a city. An observation at the end of this century. Music by David Byrne.

Ilppo Pohjola, Routemaster: Theatre of the Motor
Finland, 2000, 35mm, 13:00 min

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Routemaster – Theatre of the Motor is a filmic portrait of speed consisting of strobe-like, fast-flickering shots, and grainy, monochrome images of speeding rally cars. While Pohjola’s Asphalto was still concerned with human interactions, here the absence of humanity is total: what remains are the machines in movement that is an end in itself. The rhythmic structure is provided by slow-motion, close-up shots of checkered flags, repeated at regular, mathematical intervals, with passing shades of blue providing almost the only colour in the film. At times, the accelerating speed of the images makes it painful to watch the film, like a sort of visual Blitzkrieg waged on the human nervous system through the viewer’s tortured retinas.

Artavazd Pelechian, Mer dare / Our Century
Armenia (USSR) 1982, 35mm, 50:00 min

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Pelechian’s Our Century is a masterful montage of archive footage of space travel, edited with images from the beginnings of manned flight. A meditation on the space race, the Soviets’ and Americans’ Icarus Dream, the deformed faces of astronauts undergoing acceleration, the imminent catastrophe…. Our century is the century of conquests and genocides, the century of vanity. The absurdity of Man’s totalitarian inclination to colonise and occupy worlds. A philosophical film-poem; Pelechian works his images as if they were a musical score. A symphony about humanity, nature and the cosmos.

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Chaosmosis
Saturday 17 October, 17:00, Film Theater ‘t Hoogt, Hall 1

In every whirlwind hides a potential for form, just as in chaos there is a potential cosmos. Let me possess an infinite number of unrealized, potential forms! Let everything vibrate in me with the universal anxiety of the beginning, just awakening from nothingness!
— Emil Cioran

Ours is a world in constant flux. Life unfolds in a fog of conscious and unconscious perceptions, a chaos animated by infinite speeds. There is no distance, no proximity, no sense of foreground or background. We move through physical and virtual spaces with limbs still nimble – touch, taste and smell intact — but our eyes do not see, they reflect. The world comes to a halt as a pure staccato, a vision without space, without perspective, without context. Gilles Deleuze: “From chaos, Milieus and Rhythms are born. This is the concern of very ancient cosmogonies. Chaos is not without its own directional components, which are its own ecstasies”.

Philip Hoffman, Chimera
Canada 1996, 16mm, 15:00 min

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Chimera is Hoffman’s most understated film that explores his two most common themes: death and chaos. And it is perhaps his most immediate film dealing with frozen moments, life transitions and fragments of memory. The shots are in constant movement and it makes the image blurred a good portion of the time; periodically, a readable moment will appear, just briefly, and then the movement continues. It’s a statement in chaos at its most heightened state. The world is blurry with only snatches of clarity—it’s moving fast with only glimpses of calm. You never know exactly where you are or what is going on, except for fleeting moments.” (Janis Cole)

Jean–François Guiton, Tramage
France 1999, video, 12:00 min

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“Rhythm is the theme as well as the form of this video. Its elements are constructed and played out through a time measure resembling the busy tempo of city life. To begin, stripes of light are drawn through the two sides of the black empty screen; their unpredictable crossings and untimely collisions lead to the appearance of an opening and closing tramway car door in the picture. Simultaneously, the rhythm unfolds in an unsynchronized sound bar. Squeaking, sucking, the noise of a passing train: all these different noises put together a soundtrack that sometimes falters, sometimes accelerates, diminishes and increases in volume, or simply falls into silence. Tramage’s interruptive and disruptive repetition of the city dweller’s impressions revives the moment of experience in our perception.” (Antonia Birnbaum)

Dietmar Offenhuber, Besenbahn
Austria 2001, video, 10:00 min

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Images of the city of Los Angeles, which has been shaped by the history of motorization and where moving perception has come to be regarded as integral to natural perception. The repetition and temporal reordering of sequences creates a stream of images that can only be read through the speed of the travelling camera. According to Offenhuber, in its fragmentation of the continuum of perception “the subjective geometry which defines space through intervals of time” can remain submerged because it is already so familiar. A work that explores the forms of perception transmitted by technological media.

Scott Stark, Acceleration
United States 1993, video, 10:00 min

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A snapshot taken in a moment of human evolution, where the souls of the living are reflected in the windows of passing trains. The camera captures the reflections of passengers in the train windows as the trains enter and leave the station, and the movement creates a stroboscopic flickering effect that magically exploits the pure sensuality of the moving image. Acceleration reads like a double motion study, examining the movement of its outward subjects (passengers and trains) as well as the camera’s own ability to produce illusions of motion different than those usually generated by the apparatus.

Makino Takashi, Still in Cosmos
Japan, 2009, 35mm to HD video, 19:00 min

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“I do not think that the word ‘chaos’ means ‘confusion’ or ‘disarray’, rather I believe it refers to a state in which the name or location of ‘objects’ remains unknown. For instance, if a bird escapes from its cage, the world it discovers outside will appear to be chaos, but if it joins with a flock of other birds, it will gradually learn to apply ‘names’ to various places – a safe place, a dangerous place, etc., thereby creating cosmos (order). When watching a film, the viewers all sit in the same darkness and receive the same light and sound but each sees a different dream. I believe this symbolizes a reversion to their initial state, that when they look at total chaos through newborn eyes, they give birth to a new cosmos. I sincerely hope that the violent chaos that exists in still in cosmos will give rise to the same number of new cosmoses as there are viewers.” (MT). Music by Jim O’Rourke.

Stom Sogo, Sync Up Element
Japan/United States 2007, video, 23:00 min

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“Since I was a teenager, I have an epileptic fit. I passed out twice in this year. It is like a memory flashback; wrapped by the various warm childhood images. In this movie, a bisexual boy and a girl are dancing, a kind of love. However; you may not see them though; a strobe light creates you to see the clear images inside of you. (…) All of my film and video pieces are in many ways the abstraction of feeling of people whom have been driven into a corner or stuck in their own maze. Sync Up Element is the cure vision in our data oriented digital lives. I mean I am not making a medicine but film viewing experience itself will open up many discoveries to our natural details in our memories” (SS). The soundtrack is based on a composition by William Basinski.

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Out of the Present
Sunday 18 October, 13:00, Film Theater ’t Hoogt, Hall 1

So many things have changed. But what amazes me the most is: just now it was night, and now it is day and the seasons just fly by. I’d say that is the most impressive thing you see from up here.
— Sergei Krikalev

Andrei Ujica, Out of the Present
Germany/Russia/France1995, 35mm, 96:00 min

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In May 1991 Soviet astronaut Sergei Krikalev left Earth for the space station Mir. 310 days later – 5 months longer than initially foreseen – he returned home, which in the meantime was no longer the Soviet Union but Russia. Krikalev’s experience throws a light not only on the acceleration of history in his country, but also on the acceleration of reality, which according to speed philosopher Paul Virilio leads to the “time accident”. Mir is no longer a monument under the stars but a co(s)mic ruin that symbolises the failure of the progressive myth of mankind’s conquest of the stars.

Thanks to: Mark Toscano & May Haduong (Academy Film Archive), Michaela Grill & Gerald Weber (Sixpack), Kim Leroy, Pieter-Paul Mortier, Marie Logie, Dirk Deblauwe (Courtisane), Dominic Angerame (Canyon), Mike Sperlinger & Adam Jones (LUX), Christophe Bichon (Lightcone), Toril Simonsen (Norwegian Film Institute), Michelle Silva (Conner Foundation), Anika Tannert (imai), Kati Nuora (Crystal Eye), Otto Suuronen (Finnish Film Foundation), Hanna Maria Anttila (av-arkki), Christophe Calmels (Films Sans Frontières), Claartje Opdam (Filmbank), Jane Balfour, Mark Lewis Studio, Heure Exquise, Julia Sosnovskaya, Jan Mot and Heidi Ballet (Jan Mot Galerie), Joke Ballintijn and Theus Zwakhals (NIMK), ZKM, Karl Winter (Arsenal)

Accelerated Living // Conference

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ACCELERATED LIVING

CONFERENCE

In the context of the programme “Accelerated Living”, part of IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2009, 14-18 October 2009, Utrecht, NL. Preview here.

Thursday 15 October 2009 / Filmtheater ‘t Hoogt / 10:00 – 18:30.
Free entrance. Prior registration recommended via rsvp@impakt.nl (please indicate your full name and contact details).

The Italian media philosopher Franco Berardi aka Bifo recently wrote in his ‘Post-Futurist Manifest’ (2009) that «the omnipresent and eternal speed is already behind us, in the Internet, so we can forget its syncopated rhymes and find our own singular rhythm». During the past decade the spread of neo liberal globalisation and the revolution of information and communication technologies have led to a new temporal dynamics, both in terms of our personal lives and for society as a whole. The rise of communication networks, stretched accross time and space, has brought us to realize that clock time – the long-time regulator of our social lives – is not an absolute backdrop against which to communicate and synchronize time, but a human construction which has little to do with our experience of and in time. Contemporary science and technology have made possible a temporality which though 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.

In collaboration with the MA New Media & Digital Culture, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University. Introduction: Ann-Sophie Lehmann (Utrecht University). Moderation: Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (Virtueel Platform, Amsterdam) & Mirko Tobias Schaefer (Utrecht University).

Participants: Mike Crang, Dirk de Bruyn, Charlie Gere, Steve Goodman, Glenn Kaino, Sybille Lammes, Carmen Leccardi, Stamatia Portanova, Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead, John Tomlinson.

10:00
Introduction Ann-Sophie Lehmann

10:15
John Tomlinson (GB) is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham (ICAn). He has published a number of books on the themes of globalisation, cosmopolitanism and cultural modernity, including Cultural Imperialism (1991) and Globalization and Culture (1999). His recent book The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy (2007) examines how speed emerged as a cultural issue during modernity. “The rise of capitalist society and the shift to urban settings was rapid and tumultuous and was defined by the belief in ‘progress’. The attempt to regulate the acceleration of life created a new set of problems, namely the way in which speed escapes regulation and rebels against controls. This pattern of acceleration and control subsequently defined debates about the cultural effects of acceleration. However, in the 21st century ‘immediacy’, the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by media technologies, has emerged as the core feature of control. This coming of immediacy will inexorably change how we think about and experience media culture, consumption practices, and the core of our cultural and moral values”.

11:00
Mike Crang
(GB) is Lecturer in cultural geography at Durham University. He has worked extensively on the relationship of social memory and identity. He is also interested in more abstract issues regarding time-space, action and temporality and co-edited the journal Time & Society from 1997 to 2006. The other strand to his work is the analysis of transformations of space and time through electronic technologies. In his paper ‘Acceleration, fragmentation and combination’, he looks at the way multiple scales of action and paces of life now intersect in our daily lives. “Burgeoning numbers of technologies enhance our spatial reach, and promise also to allow ever more to be packed into the same amount of time. Temporal intensification and spatial extension run hand in hand. And yet the pattern is not simply one of further and faster. These technologies take up and build upon the sedimented legacies of past forms of life – social and technological. The promised acceleration brings not only liberation but new constraints, as it depends upon new ways of organising time and space. The new technologies bring mutual interdependencies that produce rigidities, and new dependencies in turn as what at first brought freedom becomes necessity. Old spatial and temporal orders are sometimes disrupted but also sometimes reanimated. Meanwhile the acceleration of some can result in and even depend upon the fixity and sometimes slowing of others. The pattern is neither uniform nor unidirectional”.

11:45
Carmen Leccardi
(IT) is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca. She has researched extensively in the fields of time, youth cultures and gender. She was a former co-editor (1999-2008) of the journal Time & Society. Recent publications include Sociologie del tempo. Soggetti e tempo nella ’società dell’accelerazione’ (Sociologies of Time. Subjects and time in the ‘acceleration society’) (2009). According to Leccardi, “there are good reasons to believe that social acceleration has now assumed such disrupting features as to have become an authentic mark of globalization. In this temporal scenario, the present becomes ‘all there is’, an ‘absolute present’ (Heller). It cedes the way to a simultaneous and, de facto, de-temporalized dimension. Thus, a loss of the present (not only of the future) as a space of choice and of reflexive action can occur. A possible area of resistance to these processes of dissolving temporality (and historicity) is the specific vision of time and space proposed by anti-globalization movements. Besides that, as recent research would indicate, a number of young people appear to be actively involved in the construction of form of mediation between the need for subjective control over time and the destructuration of the temporal experience linked to the expansion of speed”.

12:30
Lunch

13:30
Steve Goodman
(GB) teaches music culture at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of East London. He runs the master “Sonic Culture” and is now working on Sonic Warfare, a theoretical research on the intersection between war and sound culture. A member of Ccru (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), under the name of Kode9 he is a main figure in contemporary breakbeat culture. In his essay ‘Speed Tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social’, Goodman formulates the unifying relay for music cultures through speed, perception and sensation. According to him “speed tribes” are micro-cultures attached to a specific sound and speed. The distinguishing instance that defines a speed tribe expresses itself through the motion and rest of bodies. A music culture develops as an assemblages of embodied perceptions which produce and re produce multiple singularities. In this continuous flux of movement bass nature forms itself not as closed entity but appears as a collective through ‘”rhythmic consistency and affective potential”.

14:15
Stamatia Portanova
(IT) received her PhD in Digital Cultures from the East London University, and is now a Honorary Fellow in English Language and Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. She is a member of The Sense Lab (Concordia University, Montreal) and of the editorial board of Inflexions, the online journal of the Sense Lab. She is working at the preparation of a monograph on the relationship between choreography, science and philosophy. In her talk, she will propose a redefinition of the digital age as a “neo-Baroque” age: digital technologies make us ‘almost’ aware of our infinite micro-perceptions, and are therefore paradoxically able to intensively influence our enjoyment, even of the most ‘static’ arts. “The critique to notions of rhythm and speed intended as ‘pure velocity’, and the political consideration of how our everyday lives are (not always positively) affected by technological fastness, constitute the main shift from a Futurist to what Franco Berardi (BIFO) has defined as a Post-Futurist era. My intervention would like to replace to this definition Gilles Deleuze’s own concept of the ‘Neo-Baroque’. How is ‘digital speed’ to be considered as ‘Baroque’? Digital technology is all about short temporalities and small scale entities (second, half-seconds, nanoseconds). Like a sort of ‘temporal microscope’, this invention shows an enormous capacity to affect perception and thought. An almost ‘hallucinatory’ time thus unfolds itself, constituting a visionary experiential field where art and philosophy share a particular ‘molecular’ taste (a ‘way of treating things’) with science. It does not really matter that the dissection (or digitalization) cannot go ad infinitum, insofar as it shows a way, or a tendency, towards the infinite. Gottfried Leibniz, a ‘Baroque philosopher’ and the inventor of differential calculus, is one of the precursors of this idea: for him, an infinity of ‘inconspicuous perceptions’ or microscopic folds of thought compose the consciousness of every single moment, but without individually standing out enough for us to be aware of them.“

15:00
Dirk de Bruyn
(NL/AU) Senior Lecturer in Animation and Digital Culture at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. The past decades he has produced a number of films, videos and performances, mainly dealing with the feeling of trauma and disorientation. His talk is titled ‘The After-Image as Traumatic Affect’. “The digital nEw has had its traumatic impact to become the digital nOw. (From E to O : E > O – i.e. Pinocchio’s donkey-scream)”, he writes. “And just as the speed of train travel imposed its compact sampled staccato reading of the panoramic landscape through its window-screen, nOw the sensory cluster-of-being in global technologised space has been morphed, skewered most emphatically into the visual to succumb to the omni-presence of the technical image. The ‘new’ critical looking that is now mandated for the body finds its traces in the 70s theoretical ruminations around Materialist film and the 20s cut-up avant-garde response to the shell-shock of WW1. Like the suicided Rock or Movie star, film itself flashes-back with a new aura after its own death to stand in that spot reserved for Banquo’s ghost; to gesticulate both wildly and quietly the ‘essential’ laws and limits that this new critical body-situated perception expects”.

15:45
Coffee break

16:00
Sybille Lammes
(NL) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University. In recent years, her research has focused on the function of computer games as cultural spaces and the impact of digital maps on the meanings of media and cartography. In her talk, titled ‘“I’ll be there in a Stretch”: Digital Ludic Cartographies and the Location of Time’ she will address the curious treatment of time related to mapping practices in so-called historical strategy games. “What is striking about maps that figure in such games is that they are at the same time highly contemporary and highly historical. Their contemporary dimension lies in their transformative qualities that make them changeable and malleable at a speed that we haven’t known before. This is a feature they share with other recent digital cartographical practices such as navigation devices and Google Earth. Their historical dimension is actually also related to this transformability: players are not just reading maps, but constantly influence the shape and look of the map itself. This is reminiscent of maps and cartographers before the Renaissance when maps were used and made in much more personal, and probably slower, ways”.

16:45
Charlie Gere
(GB) teaches New Media Research at the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University and is Chair of the group ‘Computers and the History of Art’ (CHArt). He’s interested in the cultural effects and meanings of technology and media, in relation to art and philosophy. His book Art, Time and Technology (2006) explores artistic responses to the increasing speed of technological development. In his talk he will look at some apocalyptic and messianic understandings of time, especially in relation to ecology. “I start with John Ruskin’s apocalyptic vision of the ‘stormcloud of the nineteenth century’ and show how it relates to the eschatological messianism of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and then, via Jacob Taubes, St Paul and Giorgio Agamben. I will discuss Agamben’s concept of ‘messianic time’ in relation to Benjamin’s concept of ‘dialectics at a standstill’. I attempt to think this in relation to our current ecological catastrophe. Finally I relate this to a work exhibited in the 2009 Venice Biennale, entitled ‘The Ethics of Dust’, by Jorge Otero-Pailos.”

17:30
Jon Thomson
and Alison Craighead (GB) have been working together since the beginning of the 1990s on an idiosyncratic oeuvre, situated in the twilight zone between visual art and online media. Based in London, they have exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, having earned an excellent reputation as leading UK practitioners in the field of artists using technology. Most of their work deals with the influence of new technologies on our experience of time and perception of the world around us. “As time has gone by it seems more and more like we are making artworks that look at whether live information (live data) can be considered to be a material at all in artistic terms, and whether it can be used to make artworks, much like charcoal or video might be. More recently, we’ve been exploring how globally networked communications systems interact with global time zones and the physical space of the world.” Thomson teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and Craighead lectures at the University of Westminster and Goldsmiths, University of London.

18:00
Glenn Kaino
(US) is not easy to pin down. A former creative director for Napster, mastermind of ueber.com, co-founder of the Deep River Gallery in Los Angeles, visual artist… Much like Andy Warhol, he effortlessly crosses the borders between art and entertainment, using a variety of media and cultural references. His installation series ‘Time Machines’ is the result of a pronounced fascination with the complexity of time. “I’m trying to extend, or shorten perhaps, the life of my projects by adding temporal subjectivity, the idea that the factor of time is critical to the consumption of the work. In my work, time is a sculptural component with which I am trying to further existing explorations. It all started with my investigations into simultaneity, which were first exhibited publicly in ‘Time Machines #2”, an experiment in the use of sculptural installation to affect a temporary perceptual circumstance. On Kowara is a major influence on my thinking about this. His gesture is incredibly precise and clear while simultaneously abstract and poetic – to paint with time. The new work is an attempt to continue these investigations.”

IMPAKT FESTIVAL // Accelerated Living Preview

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Impakt Festival 2009
14 – 18 October 2009
Utrecht, Netherlands

It is now 100 years since Filippo Marinetti published his controversial “Futurist Manifesto”, in which he described the enthusiasm brought about by the arrival of modern industrial rhythms, driven by a total belief in speed and progress. In his recent “upgrade” of the Manifest, media philosopher Franco Berardi rejects unilateral interpretations of modern speed culture, making a plea for more reflection and autonomy. “The omnipresent and eternal speed”, he writes “is already behind us, in the Internet, so we can forget its syncopated rhymes and find our own singular rhythm”.

Our society is still driven by an insatiable hunger for speed, but during the past decades, the spread of globalisation and the revolution of information and communication technologies have unmistakably led to a new temporal dynamics, emphasizing the increasing importance of connectivity and flexibility. The tyranny of clock time has given way to a complex web of diverging rhythms, cycles and tempos, which stimulate the temporal imagination as never before.

Under the title “Accelerated Living”, the Impakt Festival 2009 focuses on changing notions of time and speed today. During a period of five days, a number of artists, filmmakers, musicians and thinkers will share their views on the construction and intensification of time, and its influence on our perception of reality, and by extension of ourselves. The resulting search for a new engagement with time will be explored in a range of screenings, talks, performances and an exhibition.

Curated by Maria Palacios Cruz & Stoffel Debuysere

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EXPO
14 – 18.10.2009
various locations

“All will be now. Dreams are too fast. You are the first. We are the last.
No sequence to follow. No fear of tomorrow. Kiss of neverness. Life of timelessness
We’ll break the speed of change. we’ll tame eternity.”
– The Pop group, ‘We Are Time’

The passing of time is something we feel intimately familiar with, and yet it continuously slips away from us. Centuries ago, St. Augustine already pointed out that tension: “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.

With works by Julieta Aranda, Jonas Dahlberg, Vadim Fishkin, Glenn Kaino, Guy Sherwin, Thomson & Craighead, Guido van der Werve.

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URBAN SCREENS
14 – 18.10.2009
various locations

Thorsten Fleisch : Dromosphere
A research on the representation of four dimensional space-time – described by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity – led to the making of this audiovisual sculpture of speed. Using a scale model of a sports cars and a dolly synchronised to the shutter of the camera, Fleisch has produced a capturing visualisation of the phenomenon of speed, which playful references to Paul Virilio and Jeremy Clarkson.

Mark Formanek & Datenstrudel : Standard Time
The recording of a performance in which 70 workers assemble and reassemble a 4 x 12 m wooden replica of a “digital” clock that displays the “real” time: a task that involves 1611 changes over a 24-hour period. This installation offers an ironic comment on the tension between labour, technology and temporality. What better way to waste time than by marking its passage?

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SCREENINGS
16 – 18.10.2009
Filmtheater ’t Hoogt

“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 something adrift in a fragmented world of information stimuli, 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 influence 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.

With works by Gary Beydler, Bruce Conner, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Chris Garrat, Dryden Goodwin, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Jean–François Guiton, Gerard Holthuis, Philip Hoffman, Peter Hutton, Ken Jacobs, Jim Jennings, Kurt Kren, Malcolm Le Grice, Mark Lewis, Jeanne Liotta, Rose Lowder, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pavel Medvedev, Marie Menken, Dietmar Offenhuber, Rafael Montañez Ortiz, Yo Ota, D.A. Pennebaker, Ilppo Pohjola, Michel Pavlou, Artavazd Pelechian, Norbert Pfaffenbichler, William Raban, Joost Rekveld, Nicolas Rey, Emily Richardson, Guy Sherwin, Morten Skallerud, Michael Snow, Stom Sogo, Scott Stark, Makino Takashi, Leslie Thornton, Andrei Ujica, Chris Welsby, Joyce Wieland, Fred Worden, Iván Zulueta.

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EVENTS

OPENING NIGHT
14.10.2009
Theater Kikker

“We will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with the violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke.”
– F. T. Marinetti, ‘Futurist Manifest’

Thomas Köner : The Futurist Manifest

The work of media artist Thomas Köner cannot be easily categorised. For years he was active as a sound engineer, before his project Porter Ricks caused a stir in the European techno landscape of the 1990s. In filmmaker Jürgen Reble he found the perfect collaborator to pursue his interest in the symbiosis of visual and auditory experiences. All these different influences come together in Köner’s recent work, in which his fascination for tone colour has expanded to the moving image, resulting in a series of acclaimed performances and installations. Prompted by the festival theme of “Accelerated Living” and the hundredth anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto, he has composed an “opera digitale” for Impakt, which will be performed with a prepared piano, a digital ”noise orchestra” and a female singer. The sonic sediments of one hundred years of industrialisation and acceleration will be condensed in a multidimensional audiovisual space, where image and sound interact as if “time and space died yesterday”.

Carl Faia: prepared piano & live electronics
Iris Garrelfs: voice & live electronics
Thomas Koner: laptop noise orchestra, visuals

An Impakt production

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15.10.2009
Theater Kikker

DOPES TO INFINITY

“I have something more cosmic in mind
It’s a warpage of time and it’s bliss for everyone”
– Monster Magnet, ‘Dopes to Infinity’

Guy Sherwin
A key figure in British avant-garde cinema, Guy Sherwin pushes the limits of cinema with his films, installation works and performances, in which he explores film’s fundamental properties: light and time. Since the 1970s he has been working on a series of studies on the illusion of movement and stasis experienced during train travel. For Impakt, he will present a selection of his “train films” in the form of an expanded film performance.

Dirk de Bruyn + Joel Stern
In his work, filmmaker and media artist Dirk de Bruyn deals with the disorientating and traumatic experience of media-saturated environments. His performance ‘LanterNfanten’ for three projectors creates an absorbing space where time is disturbed and compressed as a kind of personal research on bodily trauma and cultural displacement. It will be accompanied by a live soundtrack from composer Joel Stern, merging music concrète, art brut and noise.

Core of the Coalman
Core of the Coalman is one of the alter egos of composer and visual artist Jorge Boehringer, a project in the musical no man’s land between power electronics, noise and contemporary classical music. With violin, his voice and electronics he builds sonic architectures hovering on the edge between chaos and order.

Bruce McClure
A film projector is not only a source of light but also of sound. Nobody understands this better than Bruce McClure who with his immersive performances for multiple projectors creates a pure sensory game of pulsating rhythms and shadows, well beyond the borders of cinematographic time and space. For Impakt he has prepared a unique two-hour performance, which is sure to provide a hypnotic and overwhelming experience.

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16.10.2009
Tivoli de Helling

SPEED TRIBES

“It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.”
– Gilles Deleuze

Mount Kimbie + James Blake
British breakbeat culture is alive and kicking. The explosion of dubstep has provoked a plethora of sound experiments and cross-overs from which a fresh sound emerges from time to time. One of those surprises is London duo Mount Kimbie who inject melancholic pop sensibility and hybrid rhythmic patterns into dubstep. They are joined live by vocalist James Blake whose exciting debut reconciles jazz, soul and a taste for melodrama with the sound of the imploding metropolis.

Cooly G
This protégé of the cutting edge Hyperdub label drew the attention of the so-called « UK funky » scene last year. It’s not surprising : her spicy but contagious mixture of deep house and dubstep, seasoned with bitter sweet vocals and subtle touches of acid and hardcore is, without a doubt, a fresh wind in the the British club culture. Tribal rhythms and woozy synth chords, deep basses and aching sighs, light vibes and dark undertones : it’s precisely these contrasts that make her music so irresistible!

The Bug + Flowdan
The man behind The Bug is Kevin Martin, who has been reinterpreting industrial, dub and breakbeat since the 1990s. His fascination for intense and dark mutations of electronic rhythms and sub-harmonic frequencies was already present in earlier projects such as God, Techno Animal and Ice. The Bug is the culmination of all these influences : a highly personal exploration of bass culture, with a sound that he self-described as “warped ragga meets heavy electronic dub”. His most recent release London Zoo was praised by several media as one of the most important albums of 2008. MC Flowdan, a key figure of East London’s grime scene, will accompany The Bug as guest artist.

Kode9
In recent years Steve Goodman aka Kode 9 has established himself as one of the most influential names in contemporary electronic music culture. A music producer, theorist and the owner of the celebrated Hyperdub label, he obstinately continues to explore the big city’s sonic fabric, its energy fields and rhythms. Movement, vibration, exaltation, emotion: Kode 9’s music acts like a hyper urban virus that mercilessly gets into our central nervous system.

+ DJ Sonido del Principe (Generation Bass)

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17.10.2009
Theater Kikker

ECSTATIC MUTATIONS

“Below the level of sounds and rhythms, music acts upon a primitive terrain, which is the physiological time of the listener. (…) Because of the internal organization of the musical work, the act of listening to it immobilizes passing time; it catches and enfolds it as one catches and enfolds a cloth flapping in the wind.”
– Claude Lévi-Strauss

Thomas Brinkmann
Thomas Brinkmann is one of the foremost figures of the minimal techno movement, which has influenced contemporary music production since the 1990s. His fascination for programmatic and rhythmic structures finds its roots in his background as a drummer and his training as a visual artist, and most particularly in the influence of Minimalism’s principle of reduction. The result is a vast oeuvre of mathematically refined scores made of complex grooves, overtones and doppler effects. In Utrecht he will present for the first time a completely improvised « klick » performance with 8 turntables, a series of vinyl records and a knife.

Arnold Dreyblatt Ensemble
The musical exploration of Dreyblatt, a student of the first generation of New York minimalist composers, is driven by an inclination for rhythmic complexity built on resonance and vibration. During the past decades he has developed a number of new instruments, tuning systems and performance techniques, with which he digs even deeper under the rhythmic surfaces in order to find a rich dynamics of textures and timbers. His work remained obscure for years, until it was brought to attention by musicians such as Jim O’Rourke who described one of his albums as “the first genuinely new sound in maybe 10 years”. He has recently brought together an ensemble with Jörg Hiller, Joachim Schutz and Robin Hayward, which will offer a rare not-to-be-missed concert during Impakt.

Arnold Dreyblatt: Composer, Excited Bass, Laptop
Jörg Hiller: Drums, Automated Electric Guitar
Joachim Schutz: Electric Guitar
Robin Hayward: Amplified Tuba

Oren Ambarchi + Robbie Avenaim
Oren Ambachi uses the electro-acoustic transformation of his guitar as a laboratory for tonal research. The result is an abstract and fragile sound world that continuously searches the borders of time and space. He regularly collaborates with different musicians such as Fennesz, Keith Rowe en sunn0))). This time he will be reunited with his long-time friend percussionist Robbie Avenaim, who explores the limits of the sound spectrum using modified and motorised drums. Together they create a visceral and kinetic audiovisual experience.

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SPECIAL EVENTS

“Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
– J.L. Borges

18.10.2009
Theater Kikker

Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez
Eliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak I, II, III

The work of French composer Eliane Radigue is first and foremost an exploration of the phenomenological reality of sound : the combination of matter, vibration and resonance which ultimately determines our experience of sound. She began to experiment with electronic feedback in the 1950s, before discovering her medium of choice, the analogue ARP synthesizer. Since 2004 she has composed exclusively for acoustic instruments. ‘Naldjorlak I’, in which the hidden, complex sonority of the cello is fathomed, was developed as a collaboration with renowned cellist Charles Curtis. For the following parts, she required the participation of basset-horn players Carole Robinson and Bruno Martinez. The result is a versatile and volatile sound world, which continuously balances on the verge of perception.

Charles Curtis: cello
Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez: basset horns

16 – 17.10.2009
location tbc

Leif Inge : 9 Beet Stretch

There are few musical works that speak to the imagination as does Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. But although almost everyone in the Western world can easily hum its melody, this classic composition has not yet given away all its secrets. That’s what Norwegian artist Leif Inge does by digitally stretching out the piece to a length of 24 hours, unveiling its unknown and unheard dimensions. A marathon performance which is sure to provide a peculiar perception of time. In the words of a participant : “I thought I was a fly trapped in honey.”

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CONFERENCE

“In the sun that is young once only
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means”
– Dylan Thomas, ‘Fern Hill’

15.10.2009
Filmtheater ‘t Hoogt

Contemporary science and technology have made possible a temporality which though 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.

A day-long programme including contributions by Mike Crang, Dirk de Bruyn, Charlie Gere, Steve Goodman, Glenn Kaino, Sybille Lammes, Carmen Leccardi, Stamatia Portanova, John Tomlinson, and others. In collaboration with the MA New Media & Digital Culture, Department of Media- and Culturestudies, Utrecht University.

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IMPAKT ONLINE
16.10.2009

Internet is often considered as “timeless”, an endless space of connected websites and data files, a media sphere where users can wander about blindly, unaware of time. At the same time we face a growing proliferation of spam, dead links, pop-ups and search queries that lead nowhere. How to define the experience and perception of time spent online? When is information “fresh” ? How do trends develop on the Web? How fast do they wear of? These are the issues addressed by the projects curated by Sabine Niederer for Impakt Online. During the Impakt Festival, these online art projects will be presented in the presence of the artists.

With contributions by Theo Deutinger, Constant Dullaart, Richard Rogers, Daan Odijk