From September 7 to 11, the create your world Festival in KEPLER’S GARDENS once again invites the young generation in particular to experiment and try things out. Especially when we look into the future, we have to deal with an increasing variety of challenges. Perhaps, however, we are not thinking about a future in a hundred years, but “only” about tomorrow as a first step.
Worlds between planets — a balance between present mental health and future experiments
It is the variety of challenges that many of us just can’t sort or manage. From responsibility as individual end users to collective coping strategies, we regularly have to reassess and re-evaluate situations. Continuous accessibility on social media and increasingly impatient forms of communication push us to the limits of our resilience. This causes stress in a new form. People of different generations react completely differently to this kind of stress in everyday life — sometimes simply due to being overwhelmed by the new digital communication, sometimes due to the complex new social and technical challenges, for which there is still very little experience to fall back on.
So, what future experiments can we do, and what do we even want to do in this mood? How are we supposed to think about new ideas and projects while under acute ongoing stress?
The create your world festival invites us to develop these new ideas again, step by step, together with other creative people. Not to think exclusively about the future a hundred years from now, but as a first step “only” about tomorrow. And then the day after tomorrow. This could provide us with the peace of mind that ultimately brings us the necessary farsightedness.
Personal responsibility with regard to digitization has also reached a new level — a clear path must finally be established, especially in the educational landscape, on how to navigate this confusing labyrinth. Otherwise, the personal responsibility we aspire to will quickly turn into a feeling of loneliness and fear.
The Red Thread
The prevailing disorientation is already reflected in many areas: in social interaction, which may have changed completely as a result of the pandemic, in the use of digital technologies. Everyday habits had to be constantly questioned, but at the same time, nowhere did we want to lose speed and progress. Have we lost the thread here?
This year’s create your world festival brings a colorful mix of projects from very different subject areas. New projects will be presented, well-known projects will be rediscovered and in the entire festival area, research, experimentation and discussion will finally be allowed on site again. This sense of community has been missing, especially in the last two years, and this year we want to create it again — at our own subjective pace, of course.
The winning projects in this year’s Prix Ars Electronica in the u19—create your world category speak a clear language: we have to work on our own mental health, we have to make sure we are doing well now more than ever before. Because only then can we, as a collective, also be stronger together in overcoming this diverse set of challenges.
