This week I’ve visited the Impakt festival with a friend. We went to the event called Dopes To Infinity. We saw a cinema performance by Guy Sherwin, a music performance by Core of the Coalmen. After seeing these two events we were baffled.
Obviously I’m a completely ignorant person when it comes to media art and my friend — a physics guy — even more. We watched more than an hour various projectors projecting trains entering and exiting train stations. We started discussing and tried to understand it. It would have greatly helped if the artist would have just said something like: listen folks this performance is about this and that. But probably explaining one’s art is not done. We couldn’t decipher the message.
Freshly in our discussion we met John Butler, a computer graphics artist from Scotland. John was also showing work on the Impakt festival. He was also not convinced by the performances. He wondered why pop songs are able to communicate their message in 3 or 4 minutes, but why do media artists need ages to get their message across. Perhaps to be the antidote of a pop song?
So the three of us come to the conclusion that there is a problem with conciseness of media art. Everybody is trying to be concise. If something is concise other people can understand the point we want to make, without requiring them to spend hours. Or does media art wants to torture us and is it trying to find our maximal pain endurance. Or perhaps I should just not go to media art stuff. Well actually no I like going to new and different things. So I will go anyway even if I don’t understand it.
The Impakt festival 2009 itself is just great. Very nice graphics (is it online somewhere?), and a varied programme. Some other takeaways:
- Darkness’ Seed — a motion captured cgi film inspired by Karel Kapek’s 1936 novel ‘War with the Newts’
- The Singularity — an evening full of imagery and debate about our technological future (Utrecht, Sunday, October 18 2009)
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