Nxt Museum Education Programme
Designing an education programme for high school students at the Nxt Museum for new media art in Amsterdam.
In 2021 the Nxt Museum commissioned affect lab to design an augmented realities education programme tailored to high school students. Many students work with technology on a daily basis with little or no awareness of how they normalise certain notions of beauty. Video conferencing software, Instagram and Snapchat can include automatic face filter correction techniques to ensure that users fit in a standard look, or appear more symmetrical, smoother, ultimately more perfect.
With this context, we responded to 3 key questions:
Can we design a fun, playful and educational workshop for high school visitors?
How can we design a workshop that offers digital art skills and tools to inspire, discover, explore and create?
How can we create a critical awareness amongst students of the digital tools they use so often?
The workshop inspired students to work critically with tools to create their own augmented reality face filters, focused on storytelling and self expression, followed by a tour of the Museum.
The workshop was designed in collaboration with art educator Demi Lamers.
How can we design a workshop that offers digital art skills and tools to inspire, discover, explore, create and share?
Nxt Museum is a museum in Amsterdam dedicated to new media art. A focus on art that uses modern tools to embody modern times. Nxt believes that the tools used in artistic expression reflect the times we live in. That makes them the perfect means to understand contemporary complexities allowing us to recognise, relate and reflect on our realities.
