Impakt Festival

The Impakt Festival is a yearly on media art, founded in 1988 in the city of Utrecht, Netherlands.

It showcases films, video art, performances, music, conferences and other special events with works from international artists. Dealing with questions about society, digital culture and media, the festival aims to tackle pressing questions from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The Impakt Festival started in 1988 as a festival for experimental arts. Since its first edition the Impakt Festival has been offering a variety of events including video and film screenings, exhibitions, conferences, talks, concerts and dance nights. Besides the annual Panorama program, which is still Impakt's official selection of recent film and video productions, the festival also has a thematic program that is focused on contemporary matters. Interdisciplinarity is embraced and efforts for balance and multi-perspectiveness is preferred. Over the years, the festival has taken the form of a more thematic program. Impakt also operates an artist-in-residency scheme, outside of the annual festival, along with year-round events.

The 1990s editions were characterized by an, already proven, experimental research that formed a positive stimulus to the past image and soundculture and a necessary supplement to the mass media’s supply of entertainment. During those editions were screened works from Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Mathias Muller, Bruce Conner, Bill Viola, Kurt Kren, Dereck Jarman and William Wegman.

As Impakt Festival's prestige as a European media art festival grew, the turn of the millennium saw a turn to focusing on a more specifically on an annual thematic program. Themes included:

2001 Group Formation
2002 Whatever Happened To All The Fun In The World?
2003 It's Happening Again: Fashion, Music, Politics
2004 Cultural Autopsy
2005 Adventures in Sound and Image
2006 The Great Outdoors
2007 Adventures in Sound and Image
2008 Yourspace
2009 Accelerated Living

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