Scott Kildall and the Impakt Festival

Blog overview

Between 29 October and 2 November 2014, the Impakt Festival takes place in Utrecht. Impakt presents critical and creative views on contemporary media culture and innovative audiovisual arts in an interdisciplinary context. American artist Scott Kildall will blog for the John Adams Institute about his residency and the theme of the festival, Soft Machines, the projects at the festival as well as his own projects, and his general experiences during his stay in the Netherlands.

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November 4, 2014

I spent my time at the five-day long Impakt Festival watching screenings, listening to talks, interacting with artworks and making plenty of connections with both new and old friends. I’m still digesting the deluge of aesthetic approaches, subjective responses and formal interpretations of the theme of the festival, “Soft Machines: Where the Optimized Human Meets …...

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Opening Night

October 31, 2014

  The Impakt Festival officially kicked off this Wednesday evening, and the first event was the exhibition opening at Foto Dok, curated by Alexander Benenson. The works in the show circled around the theme of Soft Machines, which Impakt describes as “Where the Optimized Human Meets Artificial Empathy”. Of the many powerful works in the …...

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Introducing EquityBot

October 29, 2014

During my time at Impakt as an artist-in-residence, I have been working on a new project called EquityBot, which is an online commission from Impakt. It fits well into the Soft Machines theme of the festival: where machines integrate with the soft, emotional world. EquityBot exists entirely as a networked art or “net art” project, …...

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Soft Machines and Deception

October 26, 2014

The Impakt Festival officially begins next Wednesday, but in the weeks prior to the event, Impakt has been hosting numerous talks, dinners and also a weekly “Movie Club,” which has been a social anchor for my time in Utrecht. Every Tuesday, after a pizza dinner and drinks, an expert in the field of new media …...

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The Impakt Festival

October 22, 2014

The city of Utrecht, which is embellished by functioning canals and an old city center is just a 30 minute train ride from Amsterdam and 45 minutes from Rotterdam. Every year in the fall, the Impakt organization holds a media arts festival, called appropriately: Impakt Festival. The first festival was in 1988, which is ancient …...

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