Impakt festival - really a review

[Derek Holzer]

Syndicateers,

I too was at Impakt, and although Claudia and I failed to really cross 
paths, I think her call for a review deserves a good response. Here's my 
off-the-cuff attempt....

***
After going strong for 12 years in Utrecht, the Impakt festival has gained 
the kind of clout necessary to pull in some rather heavyweight names. The 
music lineup of this year's festival, including Ryoji Ikeda, Christian 
Fennesz, Mouse on Mars, Funkstorung and Luke Vibert, as well as a rare video 
program from US visionary Doug Aitkin and Impakt's near-full commandeering 
of Utrecht's Centraal Museum, testify to the festival's strong gravitational 
force. The lesson of this year's lineup, however, might just be to look 
between the superstars to find the emerging lights in the space between.

The real stars of the Impakt are the Panorama screenings, whose goal is to 
assemble out of the immense mass of submssions the festival receives a 
series of diverse, yet coherently themed, collections of video works. This 
year's themes included "A Long and Winding Road" (travel and motion related 
works), "Clash or Jam" (videos featuring or discussing music), "Folky 
Foxtrot" (which took various looks at issues ethnicity and nationalism), and 
the popular "Sonic" (a showcase of abstract sound and vision). Videos from 
North America, such as Jim Finn's "Communista!" (USA) and Emily Vey Duke & 
Cooper Battersby's "Being Fucked Up" (CAN) showed that the Bohemian spirit 
of the Beats is still alive and well. Many European works, including 
"G.S.I.L. VI/ Almada" from lia+ at c (AT/PT), "Echo/~Showables" from Claudia 
Westerman & Florian Hecker (DE), "TST.02" by Bas van Koolwijk (NL) and "DAT 
Politics" from Semiconductor (UK) showed a distinct interest in the 
form(alism) of digital media and the fetish of technology por l'technology. 
Narrative, or at least semi-narrative, works were also present, notably from 
Finland's Venice Bienniel representative Salla Tykka and her bittersweet 
love-story "Lasso", and American Miranda July's characteristic 
documentary-cum-alien abduction "Getting Stronger Every Day".

Of particular interest to the Syndicate list's "official" interest in 
East/West communication would be videos such as Stefan Rusu's "Cold Mind, 
Hot Heart & Clean Hands" (MOL), which expresses Rusu's interest in the 
far-east roots of Central Europe which can be found in Mongolia and in the 
Communist purges which Mongolia shared with Moldova. Killu Sukmit and Mari 
Laanemets' "Cure" (EST) reflected on a folk-dance festival which takes place 
every five years in Estonia as a symbol of national healing, and Aleksander 
Karisik & Dragan Zivanicevic's "The Name of the Game" (YU) took a 
tongue-in-cheek view of the NATO bombing campaign through the eyes of 
several young men playing football on the slanted surface of one of Novi 
Sad's collapsed bridges. The end-titles gave credit to an "Unknown NATO 
Pilot" for "Scenic Readjustment".

Networking, communications-art and nomadism--all Syndicate trademarks--were 
well-represented at Impakt as well. The Panorama screening "What Is To Be 
Done?" took a hard look at the question of self-expression and framed the 
issue around a 41 minute documentary of the Mail- and Phone-Art pioneer 
himself entitled "Connections: Ray Johnson On-Line". The film by Lars Movin 
& Steen Moller Rasmussen (DEN) succeeds in exactly the same place where it 
fails. While the insightful telephone interviews with members of the 
Mail-Art scene remain conceptually pure, crappy telephone sound renders 
exactly one quarter of the speaking parts of the film unintelligable. 
(Perhaps still a better ratio than much Mail- and Phone-Art itself?)

The final artists' presentation in the Couch.Club new media discussion 
series at Impakt tackled the theme "Neo-Nomads" in two very different (and 
generationally-related?) ways. Where the CD-ROM "Odyssey Today" by Gustav 
Deutsch & Hanna Schimek (DE) served as a semi-transparent framework and a 
repository gallery for their 20+ years of travel and art-making and 
-collecting around the world, Miroslav Nicic & Borjana Venzislavova 
(YU/BG/AT)presented an immersive travel experience that is both deeply 
personal and deeply aesthetic with their work "luis, i think". The 
difference between the two projects may precisely be in the level of fluency 
in the "language of new media" that sees possibilities in the manner of 
electronic presentation, and not merely the manifest content.

Strangely enough, while the music program remained top-notch, and the 
anticipated unevenness of the Panorama screenings evened out into a 
well-rounded and pleasant high, the showcase installations of the festival 
left the most to be desired. A theme of "Group Identity" was supposed to 
unify them, but in many cases this tie to bind them was worn thin. Jose 
Alejandro Restrepo's "Iconomania" (COL) films stood strong as reflections on 
the power of the media icon in South America, and Annika Larsson's 
ritualistic and homoerotic slo-mo power-play "Dog" stood the test of 
repeated viewing, yielding new details each time. And while Christoph 
Draeger's superimposition of two versions of the famous shower scene from 
"Psycho" (by Hitchcock in 1960 and Van Sant in 1998, all works USA) bore no 
relevance to the theme at hand, his work with Reynold Reynolds entitled 
"Apocalypso Place" addresses (in a serendipitously timely manner) the 
American retreat into the comfort of mass-media in times of disaster.

Arturas Raila's "Under the Flag" (LIT) related most directly to the theme of 
groups. Raila filmed a group of Lithuanian skinheads and their more 
"sophisticated" New Right overseers reacting to images from Austria during 
the 1999 elections, leaving me with the comforting realization that 
ultra-nationalists talk the same kind of crap the world over... As another 
group of sorts, Patricia Paccini's "Siren Song" (AUS) and Magnus Wallin's 
"Skyline" (SWE) exhibited all the worst traits of what I like to call 
"render-freak" art: a myopic vision induced by sitting too long at the 
consol of a Silicon Graphics Maya workstation trying to find that perfect 
combination of back-, front- and side-lighting which makes a 3-D object look 
"real" (in that 19th Century painterly sense). Must digital art always walk 
so far backwards as forwards?

With so much going on at Impakt, knowing where to look (and having five 
days, as I did) to look for it makes a big difference. But all small 
critiques of indivual works aside, Impakt still stands as a model of how to 
actually put a festival together. My congrats go out the the Impakt crew for 
pulling it off, and to the participating artists who really had a chance to 
get to know each other over the course of the event.


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