IMPAKT ONLINE: ON GROUP FORMATION AND POW!

3 November 2013

Impakt Net Art

Yearly, Impakt Online commissions three online artworks that are launched on the website in an online exhibition. During the Impakt festival, the works are presented and contextualized, often in the form of presentations by the artists themselves. This year we launch On Group Formation by Warren Sack and Erick Beltrán as a part of Impakt Net Art and next to this curator Cher Potter will launch and present POW! – Charting the Post-Western.

On Group Formation
Warren Sack and Erick Beltrán

While the early 2000s are often characterized as ‘The Age of Individualism’, nowadays we are seeing the return of the group – or, more specifically, the return of group formations and network organizations. Rather than being structured by religion or political views, groups and networks dynamically organize and reorganize themselves around social issues, political actions and events. In the live event, these matters are approached from contrary yet complementary angles. The online exhibition consists of newly commissioned works by Warren Sack and Erick Beltrán.

POW! – Charting the Post-Western
Samantha Culp and Cher Potter

Since the Impakt Festival 2012, the festival curators Samantha Culp and Cher Potter have been continuing their research and programming on the No More Westerns topic, and expanding into new directions and collaborations. under the title PoW (post-westernism) they created a dynamic, visually engaging webplatform, designed by the Chinese artist Fei Liu. In this presentation, Cher Potter will launch the website and PoW as a movement, expand on the intentions of the site, and introduce the international network of contributing partners.

Warren Sack Erick Beltrán

Warren Sack

― Artist

Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist. He is a professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the artport of the Whitney Museum of American Art. For Impakt Online Sack has produced the work ‘Things the Mind Already knows’. It is an abstract rendering of the American oil trade. As in his previous works, by exposing the networks that connect different parts of the globe, Warren Sack demonstrates that the things we thought we already knew can be surprisingly unknown.

Erick Beltrán

― Artist

The visual artist Erick Beltrán was born in Mexico City, Mexico, and lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. Beltrán’s design-oriented practice investigates how language and meaning are formed through structures that are often arbitrary, though they may seem universal and inevitable. For Impakt Online Beltrán has produced a series of animations that explore his interest in the relationship between the individual and society, the difference between the individual subject and the collective, and comments on the individual as a mirage.

Archive

Festival 2013