What does desire make us do? On 19 March 2015, Impakt will organise an evening with Dutch artist Donna Verheijden. As part of an exchange with the Museum for Image and Sound in São Paolo set for early 2015, she is currently working on a new film called Land of Desire, about the concept of ubiquitous desire in our media culture. Alongside the screening of this new film there will be presentation by distinct media expert Geert Lovink. There will be bold Brazilian cocktails and the night will end with a public conversation.

Marketers create behavioural profiles that reveal more about us than our DNA does by tracking our desires using metadata retrieved from apps, social media and websites. To what extent is what we long for affected by what others want us to long for?
Land of Desire questions today’s increasingly consumerist society and our desire-driven media landscape. Which behaviour does desire lead us to?

Donna Verheijden researches the pervasive impact of commercial, pop and visual culture on our behaviour. São Paulo, her base for two months, is the first megapolis to ban outdoor advertising and billboards in the city, pushing dominant visual culture into the virtual realm.

Distinct expert in media theory and Internet critic Geert Lovink. will further scrutinize these desire mechanisms of the image in media culture.

Donna Verheijden’s recent work, the short film All the World’s a Stage – Ways of Seeing 2013 premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2014 and has been screened at the VideoEx Experimental Film and Video Festival Zürich, the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen and at the Impakt Festival 2014. The short film was inspired by the 1972 BBC TV Series Ways of Seeing by John Berger.

Join our Event on the Book of Faces.

 * Please note, for entrance and drinks: cash only *

Donna Verheijden (Arnhem, 1989) is a graphic designer and artist. Verheijden graduated from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam in 2013. As a contemporary image maker, Donna sees it as her responsibility to analyse and criticise today’s apparent or staged realities. Her main research focuses on mass and social media, its seductions and underlying power structures. Donna Verheijden was selected as a Talent 2014-2015 by the Stimuleringsfonds and has been awarded a Grant for Talent Development.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Zero Comments (2007) and Networks Without a Cause (2012). Since 2004 he is researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures. His centre recently organized conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (the politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (bitcoins, crowdfunding & internet revenue models) and digital publishing strategies. He is also Professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee) where he supervises PhD students and an Advisory Board member of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (RMIT, Melbourne).