(Originally posted on Ymag)

It was not the first time I visited the town of Utrecht for the Impakt festival, and I found this edition much better than last year’s. Maybe I just got to explore it a little better, but generally I had the feeling of a more consistent experience, also involving the city on a deeper level.

Impakt’s Matrix City is a layered urban environment, where new media art augments the average living experience and video-games school us on the mechanisms of globalization and finance. As playful and didactic activities intertwine through the artworks and projects on show (also discussed in the festival’s conferences), an underlying concern with the future of cities leads us to reflect on emerging and controversial utopias.

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(Originally posted on Ymag)

(Originally posted on ymag.it, images from nathaliemiebach.com)

The emergence of infographics and information aesthetics, along with more or less augmented mapping, has been a major trend on the internet and mobile devices for a while now (by the way, check back our interview with Barcelona-based infoviz masters Bestiario.org, in case you missed it). Collapsing huge amounts of data into intricate visual interfaces, dynamic or not, is now an established design practice where the interest for actual phenomena and pure taste for the abstract image converge. But while a dynamic interface or an infographic snapshot of complex collected data live in the flat realm of printed or screen-read information – much like any other real-time-obsessed web2.0 phenomenon – some artists have been inspired to use these aesthetics in the slower-paced environment of actual physical space.

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