NEW PARTNER: CITY OF LIGHT JENA

We are happy to announce our new partner City of Light Jena!

From 8 to 11 October 2015 the new light and science festival CITY VISIONS JENA will be staged in Jena, Germany.

CITY VISIONS JENA is a new light- and science festival in Jena. It invites everyone to explore the curatorial topic of 'Invisible and Visible Cities' in a vibrant light parcours. How can we visualise our 'Invisible cities' that generate, process and manage data in realtime through artistic scenarios? Jena, city of lights and center for the science of optical technologies, opens up as an urban laboratory and stage for international media artists to investigate the applications and impacts of invisible technologies through interactive light installations.

Initiated by JenaKultur and Public Art Lab, in cooperation with the international Connecting Cities Network, the city of Jena, the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, the Bauhaus University Weimar, jenawohnen, the Public Utility in Jena, WG "Carl Zeiss" eG, Kassablanca and many more. With support from the Thuringia Ministry for Economic Affairs, Science and Digital Society, the Culture Programme of the European Union and the RWE Foundation.

It is not without reason that the central station of Jena is called ‘Paradies’ (Paradise). In collaboration with the Friedrich-Schiller-University the city of Jena intends to become a paradise for students and young researchers. In recent years Jena already made its way towards this aim.

But the city with 106,000 inhabitants has even more to offer: there is almost no other place where future-oriented science, modern research institutions, a university with a 450-year history, a high quality of life and a magnificent landscape are more complementary than in Jena, the city of light. Light guided and still guides the city life, not only due to intellectual giants such as Schiller, Hegel or Abbe. Light inspired the worldwide known companies Zeiss and Schott, light led to the development of the planetariums and light established itself as the most modern instrument of futuristic research fields.

There is no other region where these many intellectuals have lived and changed so much: classical German philosophers and poets, representatives of the German early Romanticism as well as major companies. This is how Jena became over the centuries the embodiment of a productive alliance of science, fine arts, of technology and industry.

For further information about the city of Jena, please have a look at this site: www.jena.de