• OCT 2022 - APR 2025 •
Green Education in Media
The EU project Green Education in Media (GEM) aims to reconnect media curricula to today’s environmental reality encompassing nature and its phenomena as well as man-made environment.
The curricula of study programmes related to digital media design and production currently focus on the creation of digital and virtual worlds occuring as storyworlds in filmmaking, serial writing and games, virtual explorable worlds in XR and digital communities in social media design. How can these digital skills and competencies be utilised to reflect on the impact of digital technology on our natural environment? The project is supported by the Erasmus+ programme (2022 – 2025).
Sustainability as a positive vision to tackle climate change
Although millions of people around the world are demanding climate protection and sustainability, the speed of the necessary adaptation and mitigation is completely inadequate. Many people recognize that planetary boundaries, the climate and biodiversity crisis, the unregulated globalized financial system, and the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth that endangers peace as a whole poses existential problems for human societies. They are ready to question the world and critically reflect the way they have lived up to now, and search for solutions. At the same time, however, existing solutions seem partly unknown, unclear or contradictory or difficult to imagine. Climate change is proven to be the most urgent and consequential issue humankind has ever faced.
How content producers address it in the next two decades might determine the kind of world current and future generations will live in. In the book “The Future We Choose” by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac (they led negotiations for the UN’s Paris Agreement of 2015) two possible scenarios for planet Earth are outlined. One describes what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if Paris climate targets will be failed. The other one refers to a carbon neutral, regenerative world, and how optimism can fend off the occurring disasters.
The GEM project focuses on the following goals:
- Heightening environmental awareness and fight against climate change
- Supporting digital and green capabilities of the higher education sector
- Disseminating green skills among teachers and students
- Creating new, innovative or joint sustainable curricula or courses
- Developing digital content, technologies and practices
The Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership consists of nine partners:
Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Germany (Project Lead)
Tampere University, Finland
Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Finland
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
University of Malta, Malta
Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland
Lodz Film School, Poland
Institute for Art and Innovation e.V., Germany
• Feb 2022 - Dec 2022 •
Ocean Future Lab
The “Ocean Future Lab” is a participation format for the Science Year 2022, which is conceived as an online format as well as a face-to-face event at various locations such as OZEANEUM – the German Maritime Museum in Stralsund, Schifffahrtsmuseum – the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, and the Futurium in Berlin realized by the Institute for Art and Innovation in collaboration with the German Alliance of Marine Research.
The focus of the Ocean Future Lab is the development of positive visions for the futures of oceans: “How do we want to live with the seas? – How can we deal with the coasts, seas and oceans so sustainably that we secure our natural foundations of life? How can we design the desirable futures of our “blue planet”?”
Sustainable use of the coasts, seas and oceans is a social challenge that concerns every species and requires both factual knowledge and the values, needs and desires of people. The participatory and interdisciplinary Ocean Future Lab is conceived as a place for the co-creative design of future scenarios for seas and people; as a platform for civil participation to address social transformations in the exchange between science and society and to evoke them through art.
www.universal-sea.org
• oct 2021 - jun 2022 •
Art For Futures Potsdam – Climate Science Fiction
Sustainability has long since become one of the issues that will shape long-term urban development in what experts call the “transformative 21st century”. How can we preserve the natural sources of life while observing planetary boundaries, and let the city inhabitants participate substantially politically and economically? How can the spatial diversity of cities and urban societies as well as the resulting plurality be further developed?
There are numerous activities on the political, scientific and cultural level needed to drive socio-ecological transformation. In an innovative research project, we look into how art can actually contribute to promoting social progress in the context of sustainability. For this purpose, the Art For Futures Lab was created, which wants to sensitize citizens to questions and gain knowledge about sustainable solutions with the support of transmedia storytelling. Furthermore, we aim at co-creative contributions involving the civil society in the development of positive future scenarios (“Art For Futures”).
