Joseph Herscher (NZ), u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD (AT), c3 (HU), mb21 (DE), bugnplay (CH)

The Youth Exchange Project is a workshop that will be held in POSTCITY throughout the festival’s run together with groups of youngsters from other countries.

The participants are selected by u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD and our partner organizations: c3 (Hungary), mb21 (Germany) and bugnplay (Switzerland); this year’s newcomers are from ArtTechLab Amsterdam. What they all have in common is expertise in a particular area—for instance, soldering, working with tools, programming, designing, writing texts, generating concepts, painting. All together, there’s a good mix of skills.

Joseph Herscher is the artist who will be working together with young people to develop the language of the so-called unintelligent machine. In going about this, the young people embark on a journey of discovery into the intelligence of a machine. On various levels, they will pose questions such as: What makes the machine and why? Is it even appropriate to speak of intelligence in this case? How can I recognize the consequences and the effectiveness of interventions in complex, interdependent systems? The answers—and, at the same time, the method of arriving at them—are simply stated: experimentation! By making processes visible and taking mechanisms all the way to the point of insignificance, these young people, equipped with an open mind can also face the question: Does it always have to be the direct approach to a solution? Can’t detours even constitute something valuable in their own right, and serve as the source of additional solutions?

The youngsters’ primary task is to build a machine from everyday objects. The festival theme, artificial intelligence, and this year’s u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD focus on the perspectives that frame this group encounter with the so-called unintelligent machine.