Students Win Prix Ars Electronica U19

In December, Josef Dorninger of OMAi led a comprehensive workshop at the special needs school in Klosterneuburg, in collaboration with the regional youth organization GehBeat. During the workshop, students created a complete animated film — which has now won the Prix Ars Electronica U19 – Create Your World Award, presented at the Ars Electronica Festival 2025 in Linz.

Here the video presented on the homepage of Ars Electronica:

https://calls.ars.electronica.art/2025/u19/winners/15705/

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Ars Electronica about the winning project:

CATALOG TEXT

GEH.BEAT conducted a media project on digital storytelling at the Klosterneuburg Special Needs School, working with eight students for six weeks to develop characters and a plot for a short film. They independently developed superheroes, giving them superpowers, names, appearances, and personal weaknesses (their kryptonite, so to speak), and created a trashy disaster clip in the tradition of B-movies. Everything was created using the Tagtool app, a digital drawing tool that allows you to design and animate characters, shapes, and colors on iPads. In the final workshop session, the participants animated the scenes live and added sound.

B-VENGERS tells the story of Santa Claus, who, during his summer retreat, is transformed into a colossal monster by the genius Fritz, who is plagued by fantasies of world domination. This monster threatens to reduce the town of Klosteraltburg to rubble and ashes. This is a case for the B-Vengers—the brainless superheroes!

JURY STATEMENT

B-VENGERS is a cheeky, wonderfully absurd animated film that turns the superhero genre on its head—with anarchic humor, visual clarity, and narrative pacing. The students of Klosterneuburg Special School demonstrate not only the courage to exaggerate, but above all a sense of timing, comedy, and pop culture. The antiheroes of their story save nothing—and yet they say everything. They question heroism with a wonderfully unpedagogical approach, which works so pointedly precisely for that reason. Every scene is spot-on, every punchline hits home. A film that knows exactly what it's doing—and yet doesn't put up with any nonsense.Radically independent, clever, and extremely entertaining: B-VENGERS is a small masterpiece with a big impact.