FREEYOU Next, builds on FREEYOU – a project funded by the Media Literacy for Al Programme, and its main product: a blended multilingual educational format (and resources) for media and data literacy, targeted to teachers, educators, and facilitators that work with youngsters. FREEYOU Next is a European flagship initiative created by five European institutions: MEET Digital Center, GLUON, INOVA+, Dataninja, and FZC-Etopia.
The main goal of FREEYOU Next is to make young people active thinkers and creative agents instead of passive users of social media. To do so, we FREEYOU Next aims to bring digital artists into the media and data literacy speculation to work on inspiring tools to change behaviours, boost co-creation processes between them and young people, and to promote cross-pollination dynamics between artists/activists/journalists/teachers to improve a collective awareness by influencing each other.
To this end, FREEYOU Next is launching this international call for participants to select 3 digital creatives, to join a 6-month fellowship programme (between November 2023 and May 2024) consisting of a blended approach with online meetings, mentorship, and a physical residency of at least two weeks.
Digital media and social media are reshaping how new generations interact with each other and the world. Very quickly they are also conditioning their self-esteem, creating unreachable expectations of how they look or how many material goods they need. All this is modifying their relationship with the environment, the economy, or politics. They get information and validate opinions on the realm of the algorithm; while doing so, they provide and consume data. The selected projects will address this relationship of usage and misuse to offer a new approach to media literacy by including work with teenagers in their creative process.
During the 6-month program, selected fellows work on their proposed projects, and present them to the public at the end of the trajectory in a transnational exhibition (Spain, Belgium, and Italy) and a final one in Meet, Milan (Nov/Dec 2024). The fellowship programme focuses on the creative usages of data but does not exclude other forms of digital art. The selected fellows will receive a grant of €20,000. The residencies will take place in Zaragoza Spain at FZC_ETOPIA, Meet, and Gluon.
Applicants should be artists or digital creators who work with data, or who have the ambition to do so, and must be established in one of the 27 EU Member States.
