Introduction

Bubbles? Bubbles!

Even before the pandemic, a trend had become apparent among children: a decrease in linear content and increase in user-generated content consumption. Home schooling and lockdowns caused children’s media use to sky-rocket and to become even more individualised. Gaming also took off massively over the past period and has become an important social factor, as demonstrated by concerts and weddings in popular games such as Animal Crossing and Fortnite.

Is the digital world reliable, however? Can we safely set our children loose in it? Does media savviness arise from high levels of screen time? The answer is: ‘No’.

If you only experience the world through tiny screens, it becomes very easy to believe everything fed to you online. This means developing different perspectives becomes increasingly important. The Cinekid MediaLab takes children as well as their parents/guardians by the hand to unravel and uncover facts about the quirks of media technologies. The latter are so integrated into all facets of our daily lives that we often are no longer conscious of them. MediaLab visitors will be pulled from their individual bubbles to see, hear and experience other creative perspectives at an exhibition which makes bubbles and realities – as well as the accompanying ethical implications – tangible.

Cinekid will present a broad range of interactive installations, games, apps and workshops from the Netherlands and abroad, including a number of wonderful commissions and premières. These works underwrite the innovation in media technologies yet offer the freedom and space to reflect and pose questions actively, creatively, to seek out adventure, try things out, to learn as well as make things yourself. Cinekid thus intends to provide an alternative to what Big Tech feeds us, namely a programme that stimulates and questions, as well as the presentation of projects in which technology serves no other purpose than to amaze, challenge, encourage contemplation and stimulate.

There is a thematic focus on 3 Trails:

1. Take a look at ourselves, or how media technology can help us to reflect on our state of being both physically and mentally. How important is ‘play’ for our brain, our development and our perspective on ourselves and the world?

2. Internet of Everything, or how our lives are riddled with artificial intelligence and computer code. Can we get a grip on this? Does poetic code exist? 3. The world around us, or how can stories told in new ways, using a variety of technologies, whilst expanding our horizons and opening up the world around us? What can we offer children in the way of tools and insights to make their lives more diverse and inclusive, to find their own stories and shape these?

This year, for the first time, MediaLab will not just take place in Amsterdam, but will also be staged in six other cities as well as online. With this, Cinekid hopes to impart these other perspectives to a wide-ranging, diverse group of children and their parents/guardians.

Siuli Ko

Head of New Media