YES 2022: Claim Your Digital Space! with EEE-YFU

The Youth Empowerment Seminar (YES) is a yearly event hosted by Youth For Understanding, gathering more than 100 volunteers and 400 students who get the chance to learn about active citizenship and topics of global interest, but also to talk about their exchange experience with the volunteers and the other students.

The YES aims to empower participants to expand upon the learnings gained through exchange programmes or other intercultural experiences, while connecting with the global YFU community, and thus become proactive and globally-oriented agents of change.

The aim of the Digital Arts track at the YES 2022 was to explore the role of artists in the age of computers and digital tools. Through these workshops we aimed to look at how the means of expression have changed over time and what the modern artist needs to do to adapt to these changes and stay relevant. Exploring digital art and its relation with NFTs was also a strong element of these workshops.

We worked with artists Zack Ritchie and Balint Tapay) for the delivery of the workshop plus a digital arts expert, Sean Ellul, who shared guidance around opportunities for young artists.

As the topic of the event was “Claim your digital space”, the Liberty EU activities focused on exploring how young people can use digital arts to share their ideas with the world and also how to interpret what they see in the media in an objective way, preventing the proliferation of fake news or hate speech.

The NFT world was also explored through this strand, by looking at how artists can promote themselves and their work in this new environment.

The seminars took place from 27^th of June to 1^st of July. The opening ceremony took place on the evening of the 27^th. During the next 3 days the participants enjoyed a large selection of workshops, inspiring plenaries and community building activities, and the Liberty workshops were among those as well.

The Digital Arts track had one workshop session each day.

On Tuesday, the session gathered all the participants of the Digital Arts track in a common session where our digital arts expert Sean Ellul talked about the infrastructure available to digital artists nowadays and what are the innovations they can use. Afterwards, Zack from Malta and Balint from Hungary talked about their experience as digital artists. All 3 of them were able to answer questions from the young participants.

On Wednesday, the participants were able to choose between working on photography or on digital drawing and NFTs together with our artists.

On Thursday, the participants continued and concluded their work. The digital drawing track published their first NFT!

In addition to the Digital Arts track, Sean Ellul also contributed with a speech in the common plenary of the event, highlighting the importance of the voice of young artists and their contribution to tackling societal challenges though their art.