Impakt Festival 2010 Matrix City

With 'Matrix City', Impakt Festival 2010 delves into the process of urbanization, which appears to act as an irreversible, self-propelling machine – making the majority of people increasingly dependent on its networked superstructure.

Matrix City depicts the tension between bold desires about our urban future, modest responses to pressing realities, dilemmas about the urban 'revolution' or alternative virtual environments as 'better worlds'. Are we really closer to a scenario where people in cities can afford maximum play and minimal work? Or to a darker scenario, where we are entangled in the urban, without a rural backup?

Impakt Festivals explores this with an exhibition, screenings, a conference and a music program.

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The exhibition 'Opportunities of Entanglement' shows practices and examples that appear along overlapping trajectories in contemporary urban landscapes, such as the meltdown of the real-estate market, financialisation of nature, mapping of the global agents of ‘matrixation’, examples of non-monetary utopias, the ghettoisation and escape of economic elites, or digital gold farming.

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The screenings explore through 6 thematic lines how different aspects of Matrix City are brought forward in the work of artists and filmmakers. 'Promise of the City' explores the city as a centrifugal power that continuously attracts population and entangles them in a web of structural dependencies. The acceleration of urbanisation and massive scale of consumption leads to the creation of vast 'Landscapes of Production' to sustain such an urbanized living. 'Out of the Machine' deals with the stress of a constructed urban lifestyle for those who fall out of the web of urbanisation – or consciously decide to depart from it. In 'Impossible possibilities' a number of compelling past, current and future visions are (re)visited to explore how they work as tools to prepare a new society. 'Adaptive Survival' brings the response by an armada of artists, activists and communities who dedicate an impressive energy to initiate a change to the current urban trajectories – and questions the capacity of such evolutionary approaches to truly reshape our course. 'Labour of Play' explores how technology provides the structural logistics for a perpetual labour that combines communication, play, sophisticated time management and active utility leisure.

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The conference brings together international practitioners and thinkers to discuss the dependency of urban societies on their technological superstructures, to address the myths and realities of urban efficiency and to investigate the recent developments of virtual urban environments. The conference will take place on October 15 at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University.

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Details of the program and of the participants to Matrix City will be announced on: www.impakt.nl

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Matrix City, the main program of the Impakt Festival 2010, is curated by STEALTH.unlimited (Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen, Rotterdam/Belgrade) & Kristian Lukic (Novi Sad).