“CREATE YOUR WORLD” is the motto of what has become an Ars Electronica mainstay: the Future Festival of the Next Generation. Once again this year, this festival-within-a-festival is a playground for exciting, unusual, funny and just plain young ideas, solutions to problems, concepts and experiments for shaping the future. All those who come up with them have one thing in common: they’re under 19 years of age.
In downtown POSTCITY, young artists, programmers and tinkerers form all over Austria will populate a village of their own—one that’s full of ideas and creativity, one that shows how they see the world of tomorrow. Here, young people aren’t just audience members; they’re co-producers too.
The centerpiece is, once again, an exhibition of works submitted for prize consideration to the Prix Ars Electronica’s category for young people that annually honors creativity and pioneering spirit expressed in the form of media art. The projects are as diverse as the participants themselves. A computer game entitled “The Decision” by Jonas Bodingbauer from Leonding entails one player—unbeknownst to him/her—making a life-or-death decision about the other player. A LEGO stop-motion film by Tyrol’s Dimitri Teufl is the account of families that had to flee from their homeland. “Blackout,” an experimental film by Jasmin Selen Heinz, Tanja Josic and Emily Poulter from Vienna, is a work of social criticism that examines the meaning of life. A colorful assortment of projects makes up the rest of the lineup, all efforts by youngsters to create their world.
For more information about the u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Future Festival of the Next Generation please visit ars.electronica.art/u19/en/festival
