The mission statement of the Spanish partner organisation, Arte Sostenible, is to "promote art as an effective tool for positive change." Both project partners consider the promotion of art extremely important, and we consider it important to introduce the outstanding visual achievements of the given nation to the youth. We believe that art is a very good medium for achieving great social goals. We wanted to achieve, if through the mediation of art, more effective social goals, such as social justice, environmental protection, or sustainability. We firmly believe that art can be used to convey this information to people in an experiential way. The uPaint application is a tool to support visual culture and introduce important paintings of the world to children. We wanted to achieve that with a free digital (and easily accessible) mobile application, they could publish content using the inspiring, educational and attention-grabbing power of art, which is difficult to implement directly.
The 21st century is the century of visuality. Our target audience comes across nearly 300 pieces of visual information per day on online platforms, websites, or on television. All of these are current products of the me-generation. Members of both project partner organisations regularly visit schools or are close to children for family reasons. Our personal motivation was that we saw with regret that the paintings made in the past are slowly fading into oblivion. We wanted to approach the uPaint-theme in a way that is perfectly known and regularly used by users: usually they take their own pictures to different platforms and provide them with different filters and stickers and share them. After all, the me-generation likes to identify everything with itself. We wanted to complement (school) art education with a fun and at the same time meaningful application. Unfortunately, such an application was not available in the digital stores, in which users could not only look at the works of art, but also modify them to their liking and share the final product.