Media, Art & Competence for Children & Young People

Workshops for school classes from year 6 to 12/13

Computers, smartphones, tablets, Facebook, WhatsApp are constant companions for children and young people. Media are an ever-growing part of their culture and promote their identity formation – but how easily and possibly unnoticed can one be influenced by social networks, or how do individuals, companies (e.g. subliminal advertising campaigns), groups (e.g. football teams, right-wing extremist associations) make use of social networks to achieve certain goals, to “shape” opinions and to promote themselves.

With Bitlabor II, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) offers children, young people, and pedagogues the opportunity to rediscover everyday media and actively explore different ways of being artistic with a smartphone, photo/film camera and PC. The participants build on their undoubtedly great media know-how, expand their skills, and create exciting works with the support of media professionals and artists. Working in groups, small joint projects are created where the participants are invited to continuously redevelop them. Children and young people will be given the opportunity to realise and present their ideas at the Haus der Jugend and the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. The European Media Art Festival (EMAF), one of the largest and most renowned events in Europe on the subject of “Media and Art”, will offer an exhibition at the Kunsthalle, whose exhibits will be an integral part of the Bitlab through guided tours and work discussions. During the guided visits to the EMAF exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, the students will learn methods of how to artistically address these major and sometimes seemingly overwhelming issues.

EMAF is a partner of the international project DCA – digitising contemporary art, which will digitise contemporary art for the European art and culture portal “Europeana” and post it on the internet.

21 museums and art institutions and four technical partner institutions will spend thirty months digitising around 27,000 works of art and roughly 2,000 contextual documents, enabling visitors to access them online.

This way, EMAF will make significant works from the past accessible to a wide audience.

The project is being coordinated by PACKED vzw, centre of expertise in digital heritage in Brussels and is co-financed by the European Commission within the CIP - ICT Policy Support Programme.

The subject of archiving Media Art is increasingly gaining in importance amongst international experts. Although a large number of artistically valuable works have been created in recent decades, they are rarely captured in existing art archives. For this reason, the German Federal Cultural Foundation decided to fund the mediaartbase.de project, for which the European Media Art Festival (EMAF), the documenta Archive Kassel with the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival and ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe have joined forces.

Mediaartbase.de is a database for Media Art that is making collections from the three project partners’ archives available to a wide audience.

Over 7,000 titles from past festivals have already been compiled in the EMAF database. More than 800 films/videos have been digitised, making the EMAF archive one of the most outstanding sources on the history of experimental film and video work since the beginning of the 1980s.