A Question of Expectations or of Just Growing Up? – Statement of the u19 Jury

After a rather deceiving experience last year, the u19 – cybergeneration Jury of Prix Ars Electronica 2002 had no problems in finding enough works worth a Honorary Mention: the quality of this year's submission was much higher than in the past.

A Question of Expectations or of Just Growing Up?

Hans Wu

What do grown-ups actually expect from young people? For a jury which has to evaluate four to nineteen-year-olds, this question should indeed be asked. This is especially true when the average age of the jury is way past nineteen. So how does an adult jury want to go about evaluating the work of a young entrant? Does it try to evaluate how near the youngster is to becoming an adult? Or does it deliberately search for those qualities which an adolescent will lose when he or she reaches adulthood?

A competition for the up-and-coming generation – and the u19 category of the Prix Ars Electronica must be seen as such – mainly takes the adult world as a standard of comparison. Moreover, to what extent adults view young people as the “professionals” of tomorrow can be seen in the growing number of e-business competitions for young talents. Even classic innovation contests judge young people’s works primarily by their ability to “pay-off” in the adult world.

Over the years, u19 juries have shown great appreciation of works which exhibit a professional working knowledge of technology; yet, in the end, final decisions have been determined by the search for what is described in the competition subheading: “Freestyle Computing”. It is matter of a working knowledge of technology that does not necessarily meet adult demands: experiments resulting from the pure instinct to play and solutions arrived at without pre-planning. Last year’s jury statement reflected such expectations: “If one wants to be pessimistic, one can interpret this technical obsession among such young people as a lack of imagination - without meaning to mourn the loss of an idealized potential of young people to be creative, cheeky and naive at the same time.” Of course, these too are expectations – expectations which seek those potentials in young people which adults may have lost long ago.

These two kinds of “grown-up” expectations – both those on the lookout for a young and yet already adult professionalism and for a cheeky, naive and creative potential – have been consciously avoided by the jury. Just the same, precisely these expectations were more than satisfied this year.

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