Vienna Humanities Festival 2024: 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.

Four keynotes lead up to the festival weekend. Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera will kick things off by recalling his eventful childhood in revolutionary Cuba and Bolivia as Che Guevara made his last stand, interspersed with demonstrations of his dazzling guitar skills. As part of a Vienna City Lecture, former EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton will explore the significance of the ’super election year‘ 2024 for international politics, while historian Christopher Clark will trace the impact of the revolutions of 1848 on the modernization of Europe. In the fourth evening keynote, US star historian Stephen Kotkin draws on lessons from history to take stock of the current geopolitical moment.

On the weekend at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, visitors can—among numerous other topics—look forward to panels on responsible AI, critical raw materials, or the future of classical music with Albena Azmanova, Isabel Behncke, Tim Crane, Virginia Dignum, Giuliano da Empoli, Yoel Gamzou, Nils Gilman, Katy Hessel, Julie Klinger, Isabel Langkabel, Tanja Maljartschuk, Barbi Marković, Eva Menasse, Ronya Othmann, Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Olivier Roy, Adam Shatz, Georgios Varouxakis, Gaia Vince and Jonathan White.

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.

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.