Next week marks the third annual installment in the ARTEFACT Festival for Art & New Media series, organized by the STUK Arts Centre in Leuven, Belgium. This year's theme is Capturing Time - Mapping the Moment, bringing the question of media specificity to the art and literary world's never-ending fascination with time/space relationships. This year's festival is packed with installations, performances, and special projects that "try to capture, record or reconstruct a certain moment, a space or an emotion" by "look[ing] into the relations and differences between human, machine or digital memories; between a personal and a collective memory." The list of exhibiting artists includes Jim Campbell, Harun Farocki, Spencer Finch, and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy and performers include Audiostore / Eavesdropper, Champ d'Action, Machinefabriek, Milanese, Modeselektor, and others. All of the works included comment on a personal perception of space, whether in the form of travel narratives or more conceptual investigations of "the boundary between an event and its representation." A symposium, entitled "Capture", rounds out the program as participants inquire about the unique contributions that contemporary media are able to make to these ongoing aesthetic discourses. Come for ARTEFACT (February 12-17), stay for Kulturama, the concurrent partner festival making Belgium the place to be next week. - Marisa Olson
Image: Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Traffic #1: Our Second Date, 2004