IMPAKT Festival
IMPAKT Festival
Case Study #1
Festival Archive
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 minimize 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.
1. Keep it simple
3. Cultivate Collectivity
4. Create Comfort
5. Contextualise
6. Fair Tech
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