Tomorrow, Tuesday 24 September, Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera will open this year's Vienna Humanities Festival at the Rote Bar in Vienna's Volkstheater. Visitors at this year's festival edition, entitled Uncharted/Neuland, are invited to participate in 24 lectures and discussions with some of today's most prominent thinkers and reflect on the big questions of our time. During the festival weekend at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, there will also be an opportunity to explore the in-house art collections on guided tours.
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.
Phil Manzanera, Catherine Ashton, Christopher Clark, and Stephen Kotkin will deliver this year's keynotes (registration required). Admission to the weekend panels at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna is free. On Saturday and Sunday, the following program awaits visitors:
Saturday, 28 September 2024
10:00–10:45
Guided tour through the exhibitions Die Sammlung Betrachten & Cranach's Holy Productivity (registration required)
11:00–12:00
Barbi Marković - Minihorror: absurde Gesellschaftskritik nah am Leben
Gaia Vince - How to survive climate change
12:30–13:30
Isabel Behncke - What should humans learn from primates?
Jonathan White - Can democracy survive the death of the future?
14:00–15:00
Katy Hessel - Art without men
Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl - Tugenden: wofür sie gut sind und warum sie nichts mit Moralismus zu tun haben
15:30–16:30
Ronya Othmann - Die Bilder bleiben. Terror und Gewalt in den Medien
Georgios Varouxakis - The idea of the West: a short talk on a long story
17:00–18:00
Giuliano da Empoli - Putin is Russia; is Russia Putin?
Isabel Langkabel - Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: das gesellschaftspolitische Potential der Satire
Sunday, 29 September 2024
10:00–10:45
Guided tour through the exhibition Exhibit–various exhibition practices (registration required)
11:00–12:00
Olivier Roy - The crisis of culture
Virginia Dignum - Beyond the AI hype: balancing innovation and social responsibility
12:30–13:30
Albena Azmanova - Between autonomy and precarity – capitalism on edge
Nils Gilman - Planetary solutions for planetary problems
14:00–15:00
Tim Crane - Artificial intelligence: myth and realities
Yoel Gamzou - Wenn klassische Musik eine Zukunft hätte
15:30–16:30
Eva Menasse - Der Fluch der Vernetzung
Julie Klinger - Critical raw materials: how to realize the Green transition
17:00–18:00
Adam Shatz - The rebel psychiatrist
Tanja Maljartschuk - Die Ukraine auf der literarischen Weltkarte
The festival will be held in English and German. Admission to the weekend events is free. For more information and the entire program, visit humanitiesfestival.at. For interview requests, please contact iwm-pr@iwm.at.
In 2024, the festival will be organized by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Time To Talk (TTT) in cooperation with FALTER, the Open Society Foundations, the City of Vienna, ERSTE Foundation, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Wien Museum, and the Volkstheater.
