Youth and young people will share the spotlight at Ars Electronica 2011. Making its debut this year is a festival designed especially to provide youngsters with opportunities and settings to show what they can do, how they go about their R&D efforts, how they perceive our world and what they have in mind for its future. This festival within a festival is being curated by Ars Electronica’s Susi Windischbauer, who already has several youth-oriented productions to her credit. Here are a few sneak previews of projects and ideas currently in development for CREATE YOUR WORLD …

Needless to say, up-and-coming young researchers don’t just happen to pop up on their own. That’s why Ars Electronica is already making a concerted effort to spread the word. We’re working with KINDERFREUNDE OBERÖSTERREICH, the regional youth advocacy organization, to get their people on board. In concrete terms, we want to find out how children and young people envision coexistence in the future, and what framework conditions are necessary to implement these conceptions—whereby the facts & circumstances ought to be configured with people in mind and it’s not humankind that has to adapt to immutable forces; whereby the ultimate aim is for our society to flourish and develop.

We’re also looking forwards to collaborating with UMLAUT-M, a youth organization that’s an outgrowth of Upper Austria’s Green Party. One of the things we’d like to emerge from this effort is a media facility designed to enable young people to get into video production and operate their own Youtube channel. The key here is imparting technical skills like editing and moderating in order for young people to be able to work independently in this field. We envision a colorful array of content. In any case, this media production crew will be covering the festival and their output will be featured on the CREATE YOUR WORLD website.

RADIO FRO is teaming up with Ars Electronica for a joint venture in the acoustic realm. A sound artist will accompany young people on an exploratory excursion to check out how our world might sound in the future.

MB21, a youthorganisation from Dresden, Germany will come calling during the festival and bring their game project along for the ride. Developed in cooperation with professional game designers, SERIOUS GAME deals with the subject of climate change. This promises to be hot!

HACKTERIA and MECHATRONIC ART, artists from Switzerland, are considering a collaborative effort for the festival. HACKERIA has staked out a domain at the interface of genetic engineering and the boudoir; this experiment will entail taking things any consumer can purchase at the drug store and using them to do the kind of stuff that goes on in Ars Electronica’s Biolab—i.e. cloning plants, scrutinizing DNA and other exotic activities. MECHATRONIC ART, a do-it-yourself synthesis major, will conjure up elementary musical instruments that can be put together and played with virtually no prior knowledge or skills.

JUMP, a Viennese initiative that offers young people extracurricular instruction related to the environment, will present one of its modules in Linz. It will focus on how to assist environmental projects in making the transition from the drawing board to real world implementation, and show what’s necessary in such areas as sponsor recruitment and project management in order to enhance the feasibility of an idea.

Participation is an essential element of the festival philosophy. The mission is to get across that anyone can achieve something. In this spirit, the aim is to avoid the conventional workshop format and emphasize open labs in which attendees need to bring neither preregistration nor prerequisite knowledge to the table. You can just drop in and look over people’s shoulders. The participation threshold should be kept as low as possible so that ultimately we can all get access to the information we need to do interesting things.

The OpenLabs will be in their regular locations inside the Ars Electronica Center; plus, a temporary structure will be set up adjacent to the AEC right on the Danube riverbank. Planning is currently proceeding in the direction of a YURT-LIKE TENT COMPLEX, a modular arrangement resembling a beehive that would provide plenty of room for interesting ideas and lots of rooms for projects that foster participation. Rounding out the site will be the tent housing the LINZ CHANGES exhibition.

A highlight in conjunction with the Symposium will be the discussion with experts in which youngsters will be able to address particular issues and engage in a bit of lively one-on-one Q&A. This format in which experts are seated at an array of tables and inquiring minds can take a seat and learn a thing or two in up-close-and-personal fashion is one that is often employed at scholarly conferences. At CREATE YOUR WORLD, it’s being used to tailor the proceedings to the needs and wishes of young people, and to make access to knowledge and information as barrier-free as possible.

One idea being implemented at the Festival was brazenly shoplifted at the mall, where parents who demand zero distractions from the retail experience have the option of checking their children into the Kiddie Zone or whatever that area is called where consumers-to-be can romp and play to their hearts’ content in pits full of plastic balls and other infrastructure designed for fun & games. CREATE YOUR WORLD will also feature such a realm, though this one will be staffed by students and colleagues of Professor Zeilinger, who is configuring several events in conjunction with the Festival. The members of this pedagogical crew will be imparting important knowledge about our world to the little ones entrusted to their care. Should make for a stimulating ride back home!