fwd: Impakt Festival 2003 and Impakt.Online Update

[media at ezaic.de]

IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2003, JUNE 3 TO 9, UTRECHT, THE NETHERLANDS

Apart from the Impakt Festival the Impakt Organisation also organizes Impakt Online.
Impakt Online is a series of net.art projects presented on the Impakt website.
In 2003 six artist or artists groups will be commissioned to produce and present a project.
We have already selected four projects (see Impakt Online Update). Two of these projects, 'Songlines' and 'Life, a User's Manual' will also be presented at the Impakt Festival 2003.
All information on the Impakt Festival 2003 is available on http://www.impakt.nl
For Impakt Online go to: http://www.impakt.nl/online/

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Impakt.Online Update: New Projects + Call for Proposals

Contents:
1) "Art of the Narrative" Commission Projects
2) "Out of the Box" Commission Projects
3) "Database Dilemmas" Commission Call for Proposals
http://www.impakt.nl/online/

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1) "Art of the Narrative" Commission Projects
http://www.impakt.nl/online/

With the theme 'The Art of the Narrative' Impakt Online wants to explore the different possibilities regarding narrative, storytelling, use of language and the changes that may occur in meaning with the introduction of the computer.

Impakt Online choose to show two different approaches regarding narrative: 'Village Voice' by Ramesh Srinivasan resembles the traditional oral storytelling, whereas Tamar Schori's 'Beadgee' took inspiration from a series of nursery rhymes.

----Village Voice by Ramesh Srinivasan
Ramesh Srinivasan has worked for a long time in a community of Somali refugees in Boston. When listening to their stories Srinivasan wanted to use the Internet as a form to engender the creation of new types of mythology. As history has shown, the empowering of a community to create their own stories stimulates a process of reflection, which in turn facilitates the sharing of values, knowledge, structure and dreams.

----Beadgee by Tamar Schori
The book 'Three Young Rats and other rhymes' edited by James Johnson Sweeny (Museum of Modern Art, New York) served as the starting point for Tamar Schori's 'Beadgee'. As a teenager she read this book and was fascinated by the rhymes. When she juxtaposed the rhymes with her drawings she made privately since she was an art student, accidental layers of meanings were created. The drawings are imaginary gizmos consisting of entangled parts that can be reassembled. Some of the parts (beads) are rigid and some seems to be alive. 'Beadgee' holds an abundance of different drawings; each drawing corresponds to one rhyme. The user is invited to choose from the gizmos, explode them and pick desired beads to comprise a new gizmo. Each individual bead within a gizmo is associated with a word from the enclosed rhyme.

'The Art of the Narrative' was conceived by Annet Dekker for Impakt Online.

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2) "Out of the Box" Commission Projects
http://www.impakt.nl/online/

The "Out of the Box" theme seeks to examine how technology and the Internet manifest themselves on the human level by asking such questions as; where do such on-line concepts as navigation, avatar, or algorithm find their place in the "real world" outside the computer? And, similarly, where can such physical activities as performance, protest, or love maintain their "real-ness" in a virtual environment? In short, we seek the point where real-life affects the Internet, and (more importantly) where the internet affects real-life.

During the Impakt festival, visitors can participate in projects commissioned for the 'Out of the Box' theme by GPSter and Michelle Teran. The artists will also explain their projects in an edition of the couch.club.

----Songlines by GPSter [Marc Tuters + Karlis Kalnins]
SongLines is a locative media installation that draws inspiration from the ancient Australian tribal tradition of acoustic cartography and the modern nomadic practice of graffiti writing. Fully interactive, the project uses wireless networks, GPS location receivers, handheld PDA computers, and real-time geo-annotation and mapping software to augment urban space with digital text, sound, and images. Participants explore the city's secret histories and ephemeral moments via wireless interfaces and an online map, and leave their own memory traces in space --self-organizing emergent social architectures.

----Life, a User's Manual: Impakt Walks by Michelle Teran
Michelle Teran will guide festival goers through this media network by discovering the hidden, wireless surveillance cameras behind building walls and shop windows. Using two cameras, and a 2.4 Ghz audio/video receiver, they will start from the heart of the festival and move out through the entire center of the city. How people inhabit these hidden 'image spaces' while inhabiting physical outdoor spaces will be revealed through the daily practice of walking.

'Out of the Box' was conceived by Derek Holzer for Impakt Online

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3) "Database Dilemmas" Commission Call for Proposals
http://www.impakt.nl/online/

Database Dilemmas
The third and final theme for this year's Impakt Online commissions will be 'Database Dilemmas'. The deadline for submitting proposals is September 15, 2003. From these proposals, two projects will be chosen for the commission, which will be publically launched on December 1, 2003. Thematic and practical details follow:

The process of collecting, structuring and storing information and data is a phenomenon typical of digital times. Obviously, data are the fundaments of almost any digital platform. As an archiving tool, the database seems to be the most dominant form by which to organise and structure information. So far.

The obsession with organising and archiving information has also left its traces in contemporary digital art practices. Many artists have discovered the database as a new domain for artistic, social and aesthetic experiments. In the last decade, these artists have been developing several different approaches toward its specific characteristics. Their dilemmas concern, among others, the narrative [how to create narrative from a static collection of data?], the formal/structural [how to change the specific indexical form of the database?] and the socio-political [how to change its character from a closed, controlled system into an open, public one?].

Impakt intends to seek and show projects from artists that explore the phenomenon of data-collections and the particular structure of the database from a critical point of view. What are their poetics, aesthetics and ethics? How do they visualise collections of information in their projects? How do they approach the traditional model of the
database? With which aims do they attack, transform and extend its static form and encyclopaedic structure?

'Database Dilemmas' was conceived by Deanna Herst for Impakt Online.

Call for Proposals

Deadline for Proposals: September 5, 2003
Project Completion Date: November 15, 2003
Launch: December 1, 2003

*Proposals must be written in English, and the project accessible to an
English-speaking audience
*Proposals should include a project description:
---description of content
---details of the technical implementation, including ALL server-side software required
---rough estimate of total project size in Mb
---time line
---relation to the theme
*Proposals should also include an artist[s] biography:
---short CV
---documentation + URLs of previous projects
*Projects should be accessible to users of all three major Operating Systems: Linux, MacOS and Win32.
*Previously exhibited projects will be immediately disqualified
*Please do not send any unsolicited large attachments [i.e. >400K], as they will not be opened. If you must provide us with large files, please send us a URL or FTP location for them.

Impakt will provide webhosting for the project for 1 year, and pay a fee to the accepted artist[s] of EURO 1000.

Address for submissions:
online at impakt.nl

Impakt Festival
P.O. Box 735
3500 AS Utrecht
The Netherlands

http://www.impakt.nl/online/