Symposium Episode 1
Monday, November 05th 2007
FORCED ENTERTAINMENT (GB)
Some of The Ways: a Forced Entertainment workshop

Widely regarded as one of the most important performance groups in Europe, Forced Enter­tainment makes consistently engaging, challenging and surprising work spanning theatre, durational performance, live art, gallery installation, video and digital media. Formed in 1984 and led by writer and director Tim Etchells, the themes the company return to are life in cities, identity and sexual politics, the relation­ship of lived experience to the images of media culture, the nature of language, the attractiveness of chaos and the desire for order, and the need to confess.

Drawing on such things as text, the possibilities of space and the creative limits of rules and game-structures, members of the company will take a practical trip into some of the process, concerns and approaches that they have pursued through the group‘s long history of work at the cutting edge of contemporary theatre and performance.

Symposium Episode 2
Tuesday, November 6th 2007
Werner Nekes (D)
„Wie ein kleines Loch die Wahrnehmung der Welt verändert hat.“

“Imagine that when you’re dead you have to watch every film you ever made twice a day in filmmakers’ hell” (Werner Nekes)

Werner Nekes is an internationally recognised experimental filmmaker, media artist, researcher and collector of pre-cinematographic artefacts. Since the 1960s Nekes, the “revolutionary of film language”, has produced over 100 films. Rather than narrative content, the medium of film and its own intrinsic possibilities, are at the forefront of his work. His persistent interest in the make-up of moving images and quest for new forms of expression, led him to extensive research into the history of visual media, illusion techniques and pre-film animation techniques. Since the 1970s, Nekes has compiled one of the most important private collections of artefacts documenting 500 years of pre-cinematographic experiments as well as developments in the early history of film.

During IMPACT07, Nekes will draw on his unique media history documentary film series, ›Media Magica‹, to consider the principles and conditions of visual perception. The study of the history of visual media technologies lends us an understanding for what happens between the pictures that sparks ideas for developing new innovative visual worlds.

Symposium Episode 3
Wednesday, November 07th 2007
Olav Westphalen (D/USA)
World Politics Costume Cuddle Party

Olav Westphalen, in second life one half of the cartoonist duo Rattelschneck, is one of the most versatile artists of his generation. His art, which is located between the realms of art and daily life, is experimental and makes use of different genres.
In performances, sculptures, installations and drawings, he reveals contradictions and blind spots in accepted methodologies and shakes up art‘s logic by over-fulfilling the standards employed by critics and the public to gauge and exploit a work of art. Often with a playful but sharp sense of humor, Westphalen’s work questions and exposes social and cultural patterns and how power, knowledge and morals are anchored in society.

Together with the IMPACT07 participants, Olav Westphalen will test the boundaries between performance and ‘therapeutic‘ practice, between theatrical presentation and authentic experience, in a ›World Politics Costume Cuddle Party‹; a kind of laboratory experiment on performance versus authenticity.