UNCHARTED / NEULAND

As powerful technologies play an ever more influential role in our lives and the ideological certainties of the Cold War become but a distant memory, humanity has no choice but to negotiate new worlds that are unfamiliar and unmapped. Climate change, new forms of warfare, global health crises, and artificial intelligence pose unprecedented challenges to our well-being and the ability to shape our own destiny.

All these coincide with collapsing levels of trust in political mechanisms both domestically and internationally and the steady rise in authoritarian ideologies. To navigate our way through these treacherous territories will require more creativity, exploration, and experimentation than humans have ever demonstrated before.

The Vienna Humanities Festival will gather some of the world’s most innovative thinkers to examine and interpret the political, ecological, technological, economic, artistic, and philosophical dilemmas that sometimes threaten to overwhelm us as individuals and communities. Their ideas will help us start to outline the contours of our changing new realities and enable us to fashion the new tools we will need in order to navigate these worlds with greater confidence and a more developed sense of direction, whether they are local or planetary, virtual or real, revolutionary or reactionary. 

For more information go to: Vienna Humanities Festival 2024

For programm information go to: PROGRAMM 2024 | VIENNA HUMANITIES FESTIVAL

The Vienna Humanities Festival is a joint project by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Time to Talk. In cooperation with: Falter, Open Society Foundations, Stadt Wien, ERSTE Foundation, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien and Volkstheater.

Cover picture: Illustration by Blagovesta Bakardjieva