A mysterious Start to u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD

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Welcome to the u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Quiz Blog! We’ll be reporting regularly on top-secret activities and preparations for the u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Festival. Plus, we have some puzzling questions to pose and really pique your curiosity. Once again this year, the Festival Village will be jam-packed with great stuff to investigate and discover. But just what could that be? What sort of ideas and solutions will be created and developed this year? Little by little, we’ll be unveiling what’s on tap from August 30th to September 3rd ‘round about the Ars Electronica Center. Visit us regularly -our website as well- and find out!

Do you believe it’s possible to produce plastic naturally? So that recycling it is 100% environmentally friendly? There’s a way! It involves a plant, one that’s also used to make jellybeans. What’s the deal here? Senior-year students at Stainach High School in Styria came up with this brainstorm. Now, they’ll explain it to you!

How much money do you raise for a better world if you collect—like 850 students at Kirchdorf High School in Upper Austria actually did—10.6 tons of 1 cent coins and then schlep them all to the Stadthalle there and lay them in a row measuring 75 kilometers? Well, what you’ve got in any case is a new world’s record!

Imagine this: you have a homemade cotton candy machine without a motor, but you want it to be able to spin that sugary floss without excessive effort. Plus, you want to distribute your cotton candy locally at lots of different spots. Class 3c at Schloss Traunsee High School in Gmunden, Upper Austria gave it some thought and came up with a simple, elegant solution, which they’ll be peddling (pedaling, actually) at the Festival.

Lots of festival-related puzzles have already been cleared up in recent months:

What’s the Festival Village going to look like this year? Lively and multihued, by all means! When you pay a visit to CREATE YOUR WORLD, you’ll feast your eyes on a colorful city constructed of gigantic Lego building blocks! In each one, there are projects and labs full of amazing things to behold. Drop in and enjoy the hands-on fun! This Village will look so cool and be so easily visible from the south riverbank that it’s also serving as a stage for the Klangwolke extravaganza on September 1st.

Which, coincidentally, brings me to my next question: How will all 100,000+ Klangwolke audience members be able to see that each participant’s individual message has coalesced into one big whole? By letting everyone build his/her own individual illuminated letter they can them bring with them to the Klangwolke! You can do that whenever you want (provided, of course, the Ars Electronica Center is open when you get the urge). We’ll provide all you need for this construction project. There are already almost 800 letters, which you can check out here. Those who are into innovation and invention can arrange and solder the array of lights in their letters, and come up with their own letters too. The main thing is to go to the AEC and pick up a receiver so your letter can pick up rhythmic light signals during the Klangwolke.

Needless to say, preparations for a festival like this also involve many puzzles and secrets for and within the production crew itself. This might not sound as mystical as the new computer games developed at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences’ Hagenberg campus, or as visionary as the Future Cube the Auwiesen Kindergarten came up with. Nevertheless! We’re just happily looking forward to the answers to lots of questions too—for instance, how much coffee and how many computers we’ll need for all the project participants. We’re overjoyed, naturally, that our quadrocopters have learned to fly, but we’re just dying to find out where the damned LED crate with the soldered light strips for the letters disappeared to!

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