u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Festival

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The u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Future Festival of the Next Generation is the Festival in the Festival. During the Ars Electronica Festival 2015, 3rd to 7th September, the u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Festival is dedicated especially to our young audience. It is the venue for the creation and exchange of ideas, solutions, concepts and experiments for the future of young people under 19 years.

This year the festival is celebrating its fifth anniversary and it’s going to be again a conclave for kids and young people as well as for grown-ups to convene and give some thought to the world of tomorrow. This year’s playground encompassing open labs, events and exhibits is a jumbo-format biosphere, a living room for the future. Once again, an open space invites lateral thinkers and actionist tinkerers, those thirsty for knowledge and hungry for experience, to take the plunge into an invigorating environment full of alternative models for modern real life. Young people are thus not only audiences but also co-creators of the festival.

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Credit: Martin Hieslmair

POST CITY

POST CITY – Habitats for the 21st Century” is the theme of this year’s Ars Electronica Festival. And so u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD is also presenting projects having to do with sustainability, developing a sense of responsibility for the world of tomorrow, and lots of novel, creative ideas about how to configure the development of our future (digital) habitats. How will human beings coexist in 20 years? What are the long-term consequences of mass exodus from rural areas to cities? Kids and young people are invited to contribute ideas and models dealing with this development.

This year’s featured theme, Music and Sound, focuses on how noise affects human coexistence. What will the sounds of the future be like? How much noise can we actually withstand?

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Credit: Florian Voggeneder

Music and Sound

Sound has a particular advantage that’s also a disadvantage: We can’t turn off our sense of hearing. Ever! Nonetheless, our surroundings are getting louder and louder, and the need for silence and tranquility in everyday life is becoming increasingly prevalent. Excessive noise causes stress and sickness. How can we combat incessant noise pollution? What sounds are conducive to wellness, and which make people feel uneasy? sound:city:lab, a youth exchange event, will scrutinize many different festival projects in terms of their tonal qualities and report their results in a post:city documentation, a sound performance in which youngsters will present what they consider to be novel, possible acoustic realms.

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Credit: Florian Voggeneder

Thinking, tinkering, playing …

So at u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD we do a lot more than just thinking things over. The accent is on doing stuff: arts & crafts, developing, drawing, tinkering and programming! It all happens in open workshops, labs, newsrooms and other sites for hands-on creativity. At u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Kids and young people won’t be doing time at a desk in a classroom; they’ll be busy having fun, doing great stuff and meeting a lot of cool people. Which means that adults aren’t the (only) ones who have a say at u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD; everyone who takes part makes their mark on this production. A big part is interacting with scientists and artists attending the Ars Electronica Festival, the mother ship of u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD.

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Credit: Florian Voggeneder

CREATE YOUR WORLD Tour

Even after the u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Festival there should be further thinking, tinkering and playing and therefor CREATE YOUR WORLD goes on tour. Selected schools and other institutions will be hosting a lineup of workshops designed to integrate the contents and ideas of u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD into everyday life in the classroom. The tour should provide pupils as well as teachers, opportunities for alternative learning and teaching methods and lay the foundation for playful new ideas and projects in schools.

Artists — whose job isn’t primarily to come up with a didactic concept for a particular project—moderate a workshop attended by pupils and teacher at which the artist presents the latest applications and the professional use of the particular new technology, and focuses on conveying this information substantively. Pupils thus get new input they can work further with on an everyday basis in school, and teachers can create an adapted didactic concept that increasingly brings the latest technologies into practical use in classroom instruction. This can result in the development of a module that yields a win-win-win situation—pupils learn to deal more effectively with new technologies; teachers are presented with a continuing professional education opportunity right in their workplace; and artists benefit from a new occupational model.

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Credit: Martin Hieslmair

The u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Festival takes place during the Ars Electronica Festival, September 3-7 2015. You can visit the festival daily from 10 AM to 7 PM at the PostCity, the former postal service’s letter & parcel distribution center at Bahnhofplatz 12, 4020 Linz (next to the main train station Linz). You can find the full program at: https://ars.electronica.art/postcity/en/program/u19-create-your-world/

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