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. 

You can find more information and the program via https://www.humanitiesfestival.at/.

The Vienna Humanities Festival was brought to life back in 2016 by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM Vienna), The European Network of Houses for Debate "Time To Talk" and the Wien Museum. Since then, the festival has become an annual intellectual highlight of Vienna's cultural offerings. The festival format is best described as a collective salon that activates the city and its residents, giving them the opportunity to become part of the relevant political, cultural, and intellectual discussions of the day. In 2024, the festival will be held in cooperation with FALTER, the Open Society Foundations, the City of Vienna, ERSTE Foundation, the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, the Wien Museum and the Volkstheater.