IMPAKT Festival
IMPAKT Festival
The IMPAKT Festival is an annual event celebrating experimental films, emergent media, and critical perspectives that has taken place in different locations around Utrecht since 1988. Each year, the festival focuses on a different theme (e.g. Zero Footprint, 2020; Modern Love, 2021; Curse of Smooth Operations, 2022). Artists, politicians, and cultural critics come together to discuss new works and trending developments in global media culture. The COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 necessitated the first-ever virtually-attended version of the festival.
Move to Online
The Dutch ministry of Health announced a lockdown (with enforced curfew and restrictions on attendance of in-person events) not even 2 weeks before the 2020 festival launch. As mentioned above, the theme of that year was Zero Footprint: Living and Connecting on a Damaged Earth. It was perhaps coincidental good luck that in keeping with the theme, IMPAKT had decided to minimise the number of speakers that would be flown-in to the festival internationally. As such, many of the international speakers were already due to join remotely, and the infrastructure to do so was already in place.
Move to Hybrid
Even so, transforming the event into its online iteration was a huge logistical and infrastructural undertaking. However, the experience has proved to be a worthwhile long-term investment, as since that time, the festival has continued to exist as a hybrid online-offline event. While the conversion to online came with a learning curve, introducing the dual nature of hybrid online-offline attendance comes with its own particularities.
The hybrid iteration of the past two years has sought to allow virtual and physical attendees to experience the festival to an equal quality. In large part this means making both physical and virtual attendees feel the larger context of what they are participating: that is, give physical guests access to online content, and provide holistic and reliable coverage to virtual attendees. Feeling the context is reliant in large part on the experience of liveness/simultaneity of access for both groups that creates a feeling of sharing in the same collective moment that events such a festival can occasion.
However, it is not just the audience members that participate in the festival hybrid– it has become common practice that speakers and performers also join the festival remotely. When they do so, we connect with them via private video links using the built-in calling system of the streaming software we use, VMix. This private connection offers more fine-tune control and feedback about the stability of the connection. Remote speakers have joined the main stage program of the festival in various configurations. Keynote speakers will typically present while being projected on the large screen in the main hall; if there is a Q&A portion, sometimes they will then be moved to a smaller screen so that the moderator can be looking at eye-level.
In a panel setting, we have standardised to give equal footing to all speakers: each remote speaker appears on a TV screen that is placed level with the speakers sat at the physical table. This also means that the overhead projector is free to be used for slides, or other presentation materials, by the speakers.
Keep it simple
There are many moving parts to the IMPAKT festival: the main stage panels, performances, talks, etc.; the screening programs; the professionals program; IMPAKT TV livestream; as well as all the various activities taking place throughout the building. It can be tempting with so many dimensions to fall into the trap of overcomplicating things.
Prioritising clear and solid infrastructure makes all the difference. We have found that the most important is to streamline the hybridity, and make everything accessible through the portal, so that this is the one place where online and offline meet. This makes it a consistent element that can be integrated as a digital asset in the changing on stage layouts, while remaining an easy-to-use gateway for the guest.
Cultivate Collectivity
The in-house audience is visible to the online audience at points of the program through the livestream camera angles. However, it is rare that the online audience can make their presence known. Providing panel/talk moderators with tablets that show the incoming questions from the online audience gives them a moment to intervene and engage with the program, just as much as an in-house attendee can with a handheld microphone.
Create Comfort
There are some less visible actors contributing to creating a hospitable, welcoming environment– namely, the Secret Online Moderator (SOM). This is a rotating role among IMPAKT festival workers that comprises welcoming online audience members into the chat, providing links and context for the talk, as well as moderating comments as needed. It is an important role that is essential to the maintenance of a safer space.
Contextualise
In-house attendees are more likely to spend longer amounts of time in one place. Online attendees are more likely to disconnect after a shorter amount of time. Part of this is feeling connected to the space and the context. Providing only an intermittent stream whether due to technical disruption, or opting for broadcasting only main stage programs, can be very jarring to an online audience. Providing a continuous and reliable stream allows audiences to stay in the rhythm of the festival.
Fair Tech
After testing several streaming options, our research found that building our own video player through Mux and embedding this into our own web portal provided the most smooth and reliable livestream. However, for clips from talks and panels, archiving the material on our Youtube still ensures for the widest reach to new audiences.