Impakt Festival: Accelerated    
Living

The experience of time is also an appropriate topic, given Impakt's 20 year anniversary. It is easy to perceive the Impakt festival asin Utrecht might easily as a perpetual déjà vu; the Impakt festival is an inherent part of Utrecht's cultural life, and belongs as much to the city as the dome tower does. But the topic appears even more appropriate in times of sophisticated time mechanism, economies of time efficiency and technologies for high speed travelling, work processes independent from time zones, attempts of stretching productivity to 24/7 and self-technologies to push the body's capabilities to its limits.

Guest curators Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacios Cruz have assembled a programme consisting of concerts, performances, screenings, an exhibition and a conference to approach the experience of time and speed from a variety of perspectives, "from dubstep to documentary, from time dimensions turned inside out to 24 hour performances and double-quick film editing, from digital opera to internet projects and avantgarde history."

The conference is co-organized by the Utrecht University's Department for Media and Culture Studies and its Master Programme for New Media & Digital Culture. Questions concerning the temporal complexity our societies evolve into, the ecologies of time and speed, the economy of time mechanisms and consequences for senses and body will be discussed by international thinkers. Speakers are Mike Crang, Dirk de Bruyn, Charlie Gere, Steve Goodman, Sybille Lammes, Carmen Leccardi, Stamatia Portanova, Jon Thomson, and Alison Craighead.

Impakt Festival, 14-18 October 2009, Utrecht, various locations
Conference Accelerated Living, 15. October 2009, Filmtheater 'T Hoogt, 10 am.
Introduction: Ann-Sophie Lehmann (Utrecht University). Moderation: Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (Virtueel Platform, Amsterdam) & Mirko Tobias Schaefer (Utrecht University).