21st century experience lab and life course

A six week change methodology at the intersection of art, science & nature. 18-27 year olds. Venice.

21C SKILLS MIXED WITH CREATIVE THINKING AND VISCERAL EXPERIENCE DISTILLED INTO ACTION

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VENICE

A singular city of universally recognised beauty.

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FUTURE YOU

Enhanced ways of thinking, learning, working and living.

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art as A tool

Creative process and perspective as a circuit breaker.

Explore human nature & human understanding — community, culture, beauty, power, life, death, politics, consciousness, perception and identity.

Identity

Connect self and society through art and other expressions of human experience — language, art, architecture, food & physical being.

PROCESS

Young people enjoying a meal during our Venetian workshop gap year experience and creative retreat.

Rise early, Participate, Contribute, Serve & Go Analogue*

*Analogue includes interpreting signals, physical quantities and continua, representations of similarities and proportions, and, not being digital.

Work on ideas and developing pathways to the future. Discern value through experience — what does the future feel like?

AestheticS

COMMUNITY

Experiment with place, life story and visuality. Focus on human connections and community legacy.

“Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”. If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future”, Elise Boulding, sociologist

WHY VENICE?

Venice 1577

UNIVERSAL BEAUTY.

A MAJOR ARTs CENTRE.

NATURE RECOGNISED BY UNESCO.

A history of the rise and fall of global power.

Built AND REBUILDING ON culture WHILE FACING THE LOSS OF INDIGENOUS CULTURE.

Venice is a human scale working model of contemporary challenges: population, environment, democracy and a more sustainable and equitable future.

Reconciling tradition and innovation, authenticity and quality of life, conservation and evolution, Venice is being reimagined with the possibility of technology and the force of survival.

Venice offers 1,600 years of history you can reach out and touch.

A tiny cosmopolitan city. A finite geography. A symbiotic ecosystem. An elective place of residence. Venice is a city of the future.

Tu parli Veneziano, ma non lo sai.

Watch the TedTalk You speak Venetian, but you don't know it by Alberto Toso Fai.

  • Practice any art...no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

    Kurt Vonnegut, writer

  • Art dies when crowds inspire its destinies.

    Hermann Maier Lund, music critic

  • Culture is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity

    Aristotle, philosopher

  • We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.

    Rick Rubin, music producer

  • our effort, our desire, our continual longing... To make meaning of the world around us through materials

    Sarah Sze, Visual Artist, Columbia University

  • Culture is the only asset of humanity that, when divided between us all, becomes greater

    Hans Georg Gadamer, philosopher

  • Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement.

    Sir Ken Robinson, Arts in Schools Project

  • Things rarely go as planned... but you have a choice: You can either crumble in defeat or create something unexpected and beautiful.

    Suleika Jaouad Batiste, writer

  • Comparison is the thief of joy.

    Theodroe Roosevelt, Nobel laureate 1906

  • The Creative Industries are vital for sustainable development.

    Marisa Henderson, United Nations

  • How, exactly, is one to fully inhabit one’s experience at a time when three and a half billion of us are sharing our thoughts on the Internet

    Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

  • Students who have taken a year or two off are much more ready to learn, much more ready to encounter diversity of views .

    Jonathan Haidt, Heterodox Academy

  • The skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems.

    Temple Grandin, author & professor of behavioural science

  • The capacity of theatre to transform lives through personal empowerment

    Kate Winslet, actor

  • What Hopper discovered was that when the people are gone, the buildings come to life.

    Christopher Benfey, Emily Dickinson Scholar

  • The only constant in life is change.

    Heraclitus, philosopher

  • Solitude creates clarity. Clarity creates meaning.

    Mike Erwin, Positivity Project

  • The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

    Marcel Proust, novelist

  • Chance has always been my best assistant

    Agnès Varda, artist

  • I am a part of all that I have met

    Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet

  • I feel at home everywhere. You’re at home in your mind, and if you’re at home with whatever you do, then you’re quite relaxed any place.

    Nicolas Berggruen, philanthropist

  • Art is the highest form of hope.

    Hans Ulrich Obrist