Introduction

Play (your part)

2020 has been a strange but fascinating year challenging us to re-formulate how we look at our world, now a new world. Stuck at home, we have all entertained and amazed ourselves in new ways, adjusting to how we have had to allow new media to take on different roles in our lives. Suddenly no longer at school but at home, behind digi-teaching tablets, Cinekid viewers have experienced a radical shift in their media diet. Where in Covid-19 times new media was often mainly for entertainment and relaxation, now it can also be something you want to escape from. Until recently, the extent to which all children in the Netherlands (and far beyond) now live and work digitally was unimaginable. This year is forcing everyone to look at the world, and the role of new media in this world, in a different light.

Cinekid is there to show that this can be beautiful, good, inspirational, well balanced. This year’s MediaLab programme, always an audience favourite, has been cut up and spread across the country in bite-size portions to receive as many people as possible – as well, of course, as being completely digital. Cinekid Play, the new hybrid Cinekid media environment, is an invitation to discover the digital world anew, both at the festival and at home. We will be showing new interactive artworks: from a digital wishing well dealing with the history of the internet to a meeting with a digital fortune teller and an interactive ASMR environment about how sound can have a calming effect online. With the Futurotheek, we are investigating how facial recognition software will keep an eye on us in the future and in The Portal, an Instagram series, a girl makes friends with an Artificial Intelligence teen. There will be also plenty of colour and pixels: RGB Jumper allows you to experiment with your body and colour; in the XR Lab we find out how imaginary digital animals look (both on locations in Amsterdam and at home); and Filtered: The Hmm on Your Face gives us by The Hmm gives us a radical make-over using Insta filters from all around the world. Cinekid visitors undertake a voyage of discovery through an ever-changing digital world. Always with one eye on the major issues of our time: the climate and the seductive technology that surrounds us. Cinekid allows you to take a deep dive into this in all its glory, but also to give your own views: whether environmentally aware or simply up-to-the-minute with new media. In Film Tricks for example, you can learn all you need to know about TikTok-ing like a pro, and in Earth Speakr you can transform yourself into a spokesperson for Mother Nature courtesy of world-famous artist Olafur Eliasson. And in Climate Clips, children from all over the world reveal how the climate is changing in their own immediate surroundings.

Whatever your role, the MediaLab hands you tools and tricks with which to conquer this new world – digitally. Play your part.

Ward Janssen

Head of Digital Culture