CfH-Impakt Festival Fellow

The Impakt Foundation focuses on presenting and stimulating innovative audiovisual arts in an interdisciplinary context. To this end Impakt organises the annual Impakt Festival. The theme for 2011 will be: "The Right to Know/ Keeping Secrets".

In the past decade, the debate on the future of intellectual property can be characterised by its unilateral focus on the opposition between entertainment industry versus piracy. This opposition overshadows the more important question underlying the debate, that is, the tension between the right of access to information and the right to possess information. A balancing act between government, citizen and industry. The recent Wikileaks publications of classified diplomatic notes written by US ambassadors, opened up the debate on whether a completely transparent government that does not keep any secrets is desirable. At the same time, withholding scientific knowledge, for example in the form of patents on DNA, vegetation, cloning, or medicine by industries and governments can have potentially disastrous consequences. To what extent should citizens be entitled to knowledge? This tension between the right to know and the right to own information is central to the Impakt Festival 2011 and will be dissected from a range of perspectives.

		Festival Fellow 2011: Mercedes Bunz The Centre for the Humanities and the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, in collaboration with the Impakt Festival, are proud to present Mercedes Bunz as the first CfH-Impakt Festival Fellow. Mecedes Bunz possesses a unique and combined expertise in the fields of online journalism, politics, art and media technology. Click here to read more about the public lecture by Mercedes Bunz.