Understand code through digital art

— De Codeshow

Digital art can be thought-provoking, especially for children – a surprisingly insightful audience.

Year: 2019
Client: Cinekid Festival
Role: ....
Photos: Max Knevel
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At Cinekid Festival, De Codeshow used digital artworks to get eight-to-fourteen-year-olds thinking – and shouting, and moving – about codes: how they’re all around us, and how they affect our behaviour. As a theatre performance, it helped engage kids with technology by comparing “soft” codes in nature, traffic signals and their pocket money allowances. As a workshop, it illustrated and explored those codes through digital artworks and games – fostering children’s interest in codes and coding, while encouraging bigger-picture, more critical thinking.

Besides these explicit lessons, the show allowed us to flesh out two important takeaways about art and technology. First, that technologies are not only in our pockets and our devices but everywhere – in our built and ‘natural’ worlds, in our societies and the ways we think and act. Second, the value of approaching art without interpretation, more playfully: that it doesn’t have to be about what artists do, but instead about using digital artworks to evoke questions and responses. If kids get it, then perhaps there’s hope for us all.