Goethe-Institut Australien

How do you imagine your future? Young people from ten countries discussed this question during dareCon!. With the help of digital media they gave their generation a voice.

dareCon! took place from Friday, 23 April to Sunday, 25 April 2021 and was 100% digital. Students from Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia participated at dareCon!.

dare to shape your future!

To dare something, that's what it's all about! At the convention, young people discussed how they imagine their future – and what they have to dare to make this future happen.

What happened at dareCon?

How do you imagine your future? That was the central question during dareCon! Together with the organisations “Jugend hackt”, "IMAGINARY - open mathematics", "Glocal Films", the artists Beldan Sezen and Susanne Heincke students worked on their future projects in various digital workshops and gave their generation a voice. They advanced their visual storytelling skills or practiced coding future spaces in VR. Others experimented with AI and discussed opportunities and risks of this new technology. The participating students took an active part in the program by sharing their engagement in digital Ted Talks, panel discussions or social media stories.

WRITING IN PICTURES - ENVISIONING YOUR FUTURE THROUGH VISUAL STORYTELLING

The power of comics lies in its universal communication ability. It can take us into existing and non-existing worlds in a blink of an eye. It can bear witness of our times and propose ways to imagine a different future. The workshop, which was was run by Beldan Sezen, began with an exploration of the range and versatility comics offer to convey the ideas and topics that the students wanted to work on. The students learned to think of comics as making a film while painting and writing at the same time and thinking of their audience as partners in crime, creating something out of nothing. Time and time again. After an introduction into key points of making comics the students worked on ways to tell their story by creating a short comic.
The results can be seen in the e-book below:

dareCon! Comic Book

On Saturday evening participants were able to stream a live concert of the band Systemabsturz from Humboldthain Club in Berlin. Systemabsturz is an electro-pop duo from Berlin. Their songs are about the fact that we all (have to) reveal more and more private information on social media, but also in public spaces. Their beats are somewhere between pop and techno - the declared goal of every concert is to have sore muscles from dancing the next day.

Details about the individual workshops and the supporting programme can be found here: >> Program

The main language was English but all the participants took the opportunity to practice their German both with each other and with the students from Germany.

Partner

Jugend hackt is a program to promote young programmers. Improving the world with code: that is their goal. Young people work on prototypes, digital tools and concepts for their vision of a better society. Jugend hackt is a program of the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V. and mediale pfade.org e.V.

IMAGINARY is a non-profit organization for open and interactive mathematics. IMAGINARY was initiated at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach, an institute of the Leibniz Association.

Beldan Sezen is an artist and writer whose work includes graphic novels, artists’ books, drawings, essays, and installations. She is a curator of artists’ books and the editor and co-publisher of Cypher, a digital comics magazine that brings audiences into the radical lives and dangerous work of human rights defenders around the world. Her work is part of special collections in institutional and public libraries.

Kerstin Rickermann is one of the founders of Glocal Films, a German film and media organisation based in London. The Glocal Films team conceptualizes and facilitates film projects with participatory approach in the educational and cultural sector worldwide. Susanne Heincke is an artist and photographer. She is leading projects in the field of art, culture and culture education internationally, in museums, schools and higher education.