In the opinion of some, the contemporary art would be too complicated, too hermetic to be able to be understood by children. With My Eye the Centre Pompidou has decided to prove the opposite by making it more accessible to young audiences, from 5 to 10 years. Launched in 2015, this webseries available on the website of the cultural institution offers, each Wednesday, a short program and more suited to young people, presenting, with each episode, more contemporary designs. 123 episodes have already been put online.
Some of the short films allow you to discover works from the Centre Pompidou, and other creations specially made for the webseries or exhibited in other museums. Tutorials for making artistic objects, origami, for example, and videos, more educational, explaining in simple terms concepts such as scale and color, are also occasionally offered.
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“The idea is to show that contemporary art is capable of producing forms of art contents and very different”, explains Patrice Chazottes, the deputy director of the public at the Pompidou Centre. “It is a real education in the visual image,” he continues. We cater to a family audience, as we can watch My Eye on a computer or tablet, at home, but also to a public school, offering workshops specific to do in class,” he continued.
bright Colors, graphics that pop and voice-over catchy to hold the attention of children
bright Colors, graphics, pop, voice-over catchy: everything in this series is designed to retain the attention of children. “We appeal to the techniques of animation, an aesthetic rather lively, in order to encourage them to look at something other than what they are accustomed to, explains Patrice Chazottes. To interest more young people in the contemporary art, it is necessary to resort to a form that is attractive to them”.
But the deputy director of the public of the Pompidou Centre defends invite to the excessive consumption of screens from a young age: “An episode of My Eye takes between 10 and 15 minutes, which is still relatively short,” he says. During the school holidays, the program is more developed, about 30 minutes are, however, available.
Damien Juillard, head of the digital youth for the educational app Bayam, which also offers content from the Pompidou Centre, confirms this pedagogical dimension of the webseries: “Everything is really thought to use the screens in a responsible manner and intelligent, to learn in a fun way”, develop.
On the application Bayam, the content of My Eye are classified into three categories,
Bayam goes even further than the cultural institution classifying the content of My Eye by topic: Art bracadabra , to allow children to discover the fundamentals of the creation ; 100(0) times of drawing , to create at home ; and M uséiformes , to discover works in the museums around the world.
A classification much more orderly than on the website of the Centre Pompidou, where the episodes are presented in the following, without indicating their theme. But, reassures Patrice Chazottes, the cultural institution is currently working to improve the readability of this content. On both media, My Eye is a nice idea for a gentle introduction for children to contemporary creation.
