COVID-19 was a further catalyst for community arts-based social mobilisation and civic engagement to tackle immediate issues of food insecurity, lack of sanitation, wellbeing, and public health awareness and school closures. Many of these challenges faced by communities were not a consequence of the virus per se; rather COVID-19 has exacerbated critical issues the communities were already facing. Working in partnership with our network of change-makers, drawing on their local knowledge, existing community relationships and understanding of how best to respond to the pandemic, we supported them in delivering direct, bespoke assistance, determined and led by those located in beneficiary communities. These locally-led processes resulted in a range of responses from the creation of community kitchens to mobile sound systems and online fundraisers and concerts to provide economic assistance to artists and the wider communities. Despite the array of projects, they all reaffirmed our understanding that art can be key in fomenting civic participation and positive societal change.

Nathalia Garcia, Elemento Illegal, Medellin, Colombia: “Communities in El Faro, an informal neighbourhood on the outskirts of Medellin where many displaced families forced to flee violence have been severely affected by COVID. The area is home to 400 vulnerable families living in dire conditions, working in informal and precariousemployment. Lockdown has left them unable to generate income and 98% of them are struggling to cover their basic needs with hunger being the most pressing issue. Preventing the spread of COVID in the area is further compounded by lack of basic sanitation and hygiene products.”

Vijay Kumar, India: “There is simply no support from the government, some families are on edge of starvation during these days.” Our team notes, “India has some of the most extremely high-density urban populations, social distancing is simply not an option for most of these people, and the consequences of lockdown are costing lives through hunger and lack of medicine.”

Whilst IPOW’s work has focused on supporting and building networks with grassroots artists in the Global South, the organisation has also developed relationships with commercial music industry partners. During the pandemic, given the devastating impact of COVID on the cultural sector, these organisations were keen to support artists and cultural practitioners. Thus, working in partnership with In Place of War, small grants of $500 to $2,000 were made available to the change-maker network.

These case studies provide interesting insights into the civic role of arts organisations in mobilising to address critical needs of local communities during the pandemic. This is hinged on a number of features. These organisations are committed to a place; often taking place in public spaces such as playgrounds, community centres, parks and schools, it is part of and shapes the local landscape. It is rooted in and part of their communities and thus artistic practice is designed by and for those communities. Given this, the art responds to the needs and aspirations of this community, and nurtures and celebrates the talent within the community.

Similarly, developing more inclusive and open funding streams to enable grassroots, informal organisations to access funds to create civic arts projects is also key. We adopted a participatory grant-making model that allowed art organisations to develop responses that were tailored to their experiences and knowledge of their communities. They were not constrained by our preconceptions of what was the most critical need and this is clearly reflected in the range of responses the organisations developed. Small grants were distributed to informal groups and collectives as well as local NGOs which we were able to award without the need for clumsy and prohibitive due diligence processes, whilst crucially complying with charity commission regulations. Thus, in sum, the pandemic has illuminated the primordial role that local grassroots arts organisations can play in addressing critical issues facing communities, especially in times of crisis. They can be responsive and resourceful, generating immediate and real impact with little funding. This therefore invites us to rethink how we understand community arts projects beyond short-term interventions that respond to fleeting policy agendas and political strategies.

Creativity Conquers COVID- A short documentary about the how IPOW’s change maker network responded to the COVID lockdown

In Place of War

Arte Amor y Alimentación  

Lluvia de Orion

Marimbea 

Tiuna El Fuerte 

Trackside Creative/Loafing Around Bakery

Malja’86 (Shelter’86) is a play based on stories of personal objects, all of which witnessed and survived the Lebanese civil war and were inherited by the subsequent generations. The objects are residues of a memory lost to the generation that experienced the war and the generations carrying the traumatic experiences of the past. This piece follows the story of Sami, who enters the memory of his grandmother, trying to look for his father. Inside her memory, he meets different characters from the past who might guide him—through their own memories and stories—to the truth about his father’s disappearance. On the opening night in Laban Studio, as I played Layla, the ex-fighter that lives in the memory of Sami’s grandmother, during a scene of a demonstration, I heard people chanting Thawra (revolution in Arabic). I felt immersed in the role; I had goosebumps all over my body. I felt a connection with my community, with this never-ending war, whose inherited trauma I hold in my psyche like every other Lebanese. After the show was over, I realised that thousands of people were marching the street right below our rooftop studio, on Spears Street, heading towards downtown Beirut, to announce the people’s revolution. I took a video on my phone and I knew this was the beginning of something huge.

The revolution produced street art, social and political art, graffiti, songs, dancing circles, and discussions. Movies were made and spread across the world from mobile phones, and every chant was a masterpiece, every slash on a wall was a mural, every conversation was an improvised piece of art. What do we have to offer meanwhile? My team of 25 young people, Laban, is a theatre-based organisation, working since 2009 in Lebanon to create safe spaces of expression. After hours and hours of discussions, the team members met and decided that no art can contain the moment and taking our art forms into the street is a selfish act: Our work will be climbing over the revolution’s shoulders and will add nothing to it. 

We decided to join our people. We took to the streets for months, experienced tear gas, rubber bullets, were assaulted by police thugs, got arrested, protested, shouted, chanted, danced, talked, and put our hearts, bodies, and intellect into this revolution as we do with our art. It was a collective masterpiece in the making. Meanwhile, the conversation didn’t stop: What do we do with our art? We are artists, and this is what we do for a living, to provide for our families, to survive.

carbon trading rules. Up until now cultural policy has, by and large, been oblivious to the encroaching climate crisis, rarely invoking ‘externalities’ from nature (i.e. clean air, green space, carbon profiles), or cultural rights, safety and social inclusion, profoundly affected by environmental conditions. This is true at every level, though city policy is more progressive than national policy, as are smaller institutional commitments. New ambition in the cultural sector is creating conditions for good climate governance.

The arts, like any other sector, have an ecological footprint and Julie’s Bicycle (JB), founded in 2007, began with a focus on the sector’s impacts, and ways to work within the ecological constraints of our planet.  Unleashing the energy of the creative community and championing values that restore our sense of belonging within nature, was the real objective. Beyond the arts, the potential of the

contracted for three years; by the time we complete the current contract (2023) the programme will be over a decade old. Results show an annual 4.5% reduction in energy use across 1,200 organisations, equivalent to over £16million in energy savings, with improved wellbeing and creative inspiration.  Over time the partnership has got more demanding; 2018-2022 outputs include setting science-based targets for Arts Council’s largest energy users, 30 major institutions comprising 80 sites, which collectively reduced emissions by 18% in 2019-20.

In the 6 months preceding COP 26 JB returned to national policy to understand progress aligning national culture policy with the Paris Agreement, as part of the British Council’s Climate Connection. Desk-based research, a survey to about 200 ministries, interviews and in-depth roundtables in Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, the UK, and Colombia, explored policy commitments and trends.We found that…

1. In spite of the Paris Agreement, requirements for climate action are still rare in national cultural policy. In the main, priorities are not yet reading explicitly across commitments to achieving global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions nor to environmental discourse on justice and just transition. There are some outstanding exceptions, notably Argentina where cultural policy reads explicitly across the national climate policy.

2. Many of the priorities of national cultural policies are environmental issues, especially relating to justice but framing and terminology does not, in the main, illuminate the commonalities. Cultural rights are often connected with environmental justice, and arts for transformation is connected with ‘just transition’. Translating cultural priorities into the vernacular of environmental policy and enriching environmental policy with cultural perspectives is a good starting point.

To address the tensions and inequalities that have arisen from the emergence of global cities, new approaches are needed that combine top-down urban policy with bottom-up ‘citymaking’ and centre around public values. Such an approach should not so much deny the interconnectedness of cities, the rise of digital networks, or the dynamic interaction between the various scapes. Rather, these should be embraced from a different perspective: a perspective that foregrounds civic relations and public values. In the past decade or so, digital and responsive placemaking has emerged as an approach that does exactly that. Digital and responsive placemakers understand our cities as ‘hybrid spaces’, simultaneously produced by their physical design as well as through their manifestations in virtual networks. The experience of a city is not just that of its buildings and monuments, its materialised institutions like city halls and local libraries and locally embedded cultural practices from weekly markets to critical mass bike rides. Increasingly, the ways in which the city is made up also include mediated versions of these experiences, through urban sensor data, social network practices and the search algorithms of digital map services, all reinforcing each other.

As such, in times of global pandemic, responsive placemaking becomes relevant in the context of border closures, spatial isolation, loss of mobility within and between cities, social distancing and quarantine measures. Although the pandemic has had devastating effects for individuals and societies globally, it is also an opportunity to rethink the ways we engage in intercultural dialogue and responsive placemaking in sustainable and equitable formats. As stated by Michele Acuto, director of Connected Cities Lab and professor of global urban politics in the School of Design at the University of Melbourne, “empowerment and community-building need to be at the heart of the digital lessons we are learning from COVID-19.“³ Although we are not travelling, we must work to understand better new types of transnational mobility. According to Federico Parolotto, in post-pandemic landscapes, hyper-mobility may be less feasible and therefore “digital connectivity will emerge as the most prominent transport technologies.”⁴ Although we are social beings, and most of us crave physical connectedness with others, the pandemic has revealed that we can and must continue to develop effective, inclusive and meaningful ways to connect digitally—novel forms of mobility.

The use of urban media technologies such as sensing and interaction technologies, social media, virtual and augmented reality tools and streaming solutions can strengthen community building and civic engagement in novel placemaking practices—such “responsive placemaking” promotes the democratisation of public space, facilitates public awareness about the urgencies of climate change with potential worldly resonance and enables the togetherness of people in dispersed and diverse locations. This multidimensional responsiveness of placemaking inserts citizen bottom up process in urban development of newly emerging resilient cities—such as the 100 Carbon-Neutral Cities in Europe til 2030—and will be part and parcel of Responsible Next Renaissance, responsive and responsible to its citizen-driven novel arts and technologies.

¹ Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity al large: cultural dimensions of globalization, volume 1. U of Minnesota Press.

² William H. Whyte in City: Rediscovering the Center (1988)

³ Acuto, M. 2020, ‘Will COVID-19 Make Us Think of Cities Differently?’: https://newcities.org/the-big-picture-will-covid-19-make-us-think-cities-differently/

⁴ Federico Parolotto, F. 2020, ‘Mobility in the Age of Coronavirus’: https://newcities.org/the-big-picture-mobility-in-the-age-of-coronavirus/

⁵ Public Face is commissioned by Public Art for the Media Facades Festival 2010 http://connectingcities.net/project/mood-gasometer

Our crises, often dark and gloomy, weigh heavily and can push us into passivity and resignation. Yet crises can be opportunities and provide a gateway from one world to the next. Take a helicopter view of the vast range of initiatives happening, large and small, across Europe and beyond to address the solutions to create a more human- and nature-centred world and you see some positive patterns. Still, for the moment, fragmented and without sufficient power and traction, big agendas are coming together in unprecedented ways and driving this change are many: activists, civil society, politicians, researchers, inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, business, writers and more. There is a mood and a movement emerging. We are seeing the possibility of creating a different world driven on other principles. There is a Planet B in sight, even though to get there we must get Planet A right.

It is a compelling story. Think how eco-principles are beginning to shape our mindset and how that provides the frame and therefore

We have an image of what could be: a zero-carbon society, a gender-equal society, a world where the dividends rather than the threats of diversity are promoted. The solutions are there but we think too often that technology will sort it out and that we can continue to just act as before. Technology takes on the responsibility and authority. We abnegate, we feel less answerable to what is happening. Shifting our mindset and how we think, plan and act—our behaviour—is the far bigger task.

Taking an eagle-eye view of the world in motion demands we unscramble the nested complexities and look at existing trends in order to assess their depth or superficiality, their characteristics and the nature of their impacts. 

A good analogy is to think of change like an ocean. Ripples on the surface are less important than waves of increasing significance, which are themselves formed by tides, currents, climatic changes and

A mindset is the order within which people structure their worlds and how they make choices, both practical and idealistic, based on values, philosophy, traditions, experience and aspirations. Mindset is our accustomed, convenient way of thinking and guide to decision-making. It not only determines how we act in our small local world, but also how we think and act on an ever-encompassing stage. Mindset is the settled summary of our prejudices and priorities and the rationalisations we give them. A changed mindset is a re-rationalisation of a person’s behaviour and is difficult as people like their behaviour to be coherent—at least to themselves.

imaginatively will it be approached. This is not to deny the value of our existing specialist knowledge. We cannot all simultaneously have the skills of an engineer, a biochemist or environmentalist, but we can understand their essence and so merge them with other skills or insights to make them more effective. This integration with other skills—especially in the human and social sciences, such as history, anthropology, sociology and psychology—has too often been lost in most affairs. For instance, a traffic issue is never only about cars and land use. If transport planners had understood psychology or culture better or the ideas of mental geography, they would have been more careful about building urban motorways that scorch their route through communities. 

So, how can youthink small and with less when we are used to thinking big and with more? This transformation is a cultural project, the biggest of our times, as it is about values, mindset, attitudes and hearts, minds and skills. Seeing things culturally is powerful as culture is who we are. Creativity helps shape what we can become. 

There are various ways to change behaviour and mindset: to coerce through force or regulation; to induce through payment or incentives; to convince through argument; to con, fool or trick people; to seduce (an odd combination of the voluntary and involuntary); and finally to create and publicise aspirational models. It is the latter we need to

Engagement with the creative activities combines both stretching oneself and focusing; feeling the senses and expressing emotion. Art, for instance, can broaden horizons and convey meaning with immediacy as well as depth; it can facilitate immediate and profound communication; symbolise complex ideas and emotions or encapsulate previously scattered thoughts; anchor identity and enhance communal bonds or, conversely, stun and shock for social, moral, or thought-provoking ends. Art can criticise or create joy, entertain, be beautiful and even soothe the soul and promote popular morale. More broadly, expression through the arts is a way of passing ideas and concepts on to later generations in a (somewhat) universal language. 

What art does is not a linear process. Humans are largely driven by their sensory and emotional landscape in spite of centuries of developing scientific knowledge and logical, analytical, abstract and technical thought. We are not rational in a scientific sense, but we are a-rational rather than irrational. This is why all cultures develop arts. 

What are the elements that help transformation along the way? We see here a combination of urgency, perhaps a crisis, and increasing evidence that the old ways do not work. Then a new concept comes in that encapsulates a way forward, as when the notion of sustainability emerged especially after the Club of Rome report in 1972. That in turn can drive an intent, a vision, a mission. Missions act as calls to action and as gathering devices to bring interests together towards a common aim. Crucially, we need real-life projects that embed the intent as it is only the lived experience of, say, a sustainability

This is a place of relationships, from the incidental to the casual to the deeply profound. You connect and communicate face to face with neighbours, work colleagues, friends, acquaintances and those different from you. You link to the wider world physically and digitally as well as with your past and potential futures.This place is locally bonded. It is at ease with itself and with the wider world. It reaches out. It is relaxed about meshing its diversities. There is seamless connectivity enabled by high quality urban design, good gathering places and possibilities for chance encounter. Its walkability and varied transport modes—internally- and externally-focused—connect beyond the city confines. Its digital infrastructures reach out to virtual worlds stretching out far and wide. It is the hub from which your transactions with the world flow—both those near to you and those afar.

In their recent history, Europe and the countries of the Western world have caused dislocations and injustices that continue to this day and whose postcolonial reappraisal is far from complete. 

Against this background, do we even want to speak of a New European renaissance? Is there not something deeply nostalgic about the Renaissance concept, as the historian Thomas Tobias Becker recently stated in a lecture?³ „The past was [in the pre-Modern era] the Golden Age, change itself was suspect. If change was wanted, it dressed itself in the garb of return, renaissance, reformation or revolution.” Such a nostalgic understanding of a European renaissance, however, would be backward-looking, Eurocentric and ultimately hostile to progress. 

A desirable progressive European renaissance that wants to be more than a nostalgic transfiguration, that rather wants to unfold a great transformational power, must be driven by openness and exchange with the world, by a clear commitment to dialogue and to the

New focal points are regularly added to the Latitude website. Writers like Cidinha da Silva from Brazil and Philipp Khabo Koepsell from Germany, for example, have written essays on „black literature“ and its positioning in the global literature business. The constantly growing number of voices on Latitude can be accessed via a register of experts that makes the participants visible and enables networking among them. In addition, ideas and insights from many Goethe-Institut projects on decolonisation and postcolonial power relations flow into Latitude. The topics range from the return of illegally acquired art objects to the societies of origin and the decolonisation of museums to the redefinition of power relations between the West and the global South and the reorientation of postcolonial development cooperation. For example, the handling of controversial art objects from former colonies is examined from different perspectives, from experts calling for unconditional repatriation as well as from advocates of a broader spectrum of alternative approaches to cooperation between former colonies and colonial powers. These debates are necessary to gain a sense of a decolonised and anti-racist world.

The Covid-19 pandemic physically isolated people from each other worldwide. At the same time, the world also moved a little closer together in the digital realm through the final breakthrough of unbounded communication and learning platforms. The Goethe-Institut as a provider of global learning opportunities also found itself exposed to these opposing dynamics. The possibilities of digital learning, especially in the area of cultural and creative industries, are far from exhausted. 

Since 2015, the Goethe-Institut has been testing hybrid formats with the Massive Open Online Course „Managing the Arts: Cultural Organizations in Transition“ and the „Master in Cultural Management“ degree programme run jointly with Leuphana University Lüneburg, in which more than 27,000 participants from more than 190 countries around the world have so far exchanged ideas about the work and the changing conditions of the global cultural sector and the cultural and creative industries. More than 50 lecturers from five continents share their knowledge and create a global learning platform for change through culture. As the academic director of the MOOC Managing the Arts Prof. Dr. Nishant Shah puts it, „What impressed us was how many people were talking in the forum about how culture

“It is hard to see a way to a golden age, especially since we know we need to shift our economic order and a way of life that is materially expansive, socially divisive and environmentally hostile. And doing that cannot be grasped by a business-as-usual approach as it takes a while for new ethical stances and new ways of operating to take root and to establish a new and coherent world view.“¹

The impression of missing out on the next is re-enforced by the ever-growing need for the next big transformations to tackle climate change and save the planet from overheating. For 30 years now, transformation toward a sustainable society has been debated in professional circles and while a bundle of theories emerged how to change complex systems in a wicked crisis—from Uwe Scheidewind’s Zukunftskunst to Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy—societies at large are unwilling or reluctant to embrace change, especially quick change, without guarantees about being on the winning side after such change. Even with the emergence of activist groups like Fridays For Future—the youth-led global climate crisis strike movement—and declarations of a climate crisis in many cities, speedy realisation in societal change is not widespread. It is five minutes to midnight and still the “Next” seems to remain a grim inevitability rather than a cheerful freedom.

But what if the “Next“ is something different?

What if… generating the next generation of talents, jobs, housing, cities and streets, growth and wealth in the current system of doing the next thing no longer works given the current paradox of a raging standstill?

What if… for change of the societal pact and its structures to happen, understanding and researching the “next” as a process for the systemic “next” is necessary?

What if… the “next” is an innovative method of change-making?

Our contribution to this Next Renaissance takes a closer look at examples of re-designing the systems of arts, culture and creative industries just as arts, culture and creative industries are re-designing systems of industries and markets, of cities and regions or of technologies and societal changes. And let’s not forget how the arts and culture re-design technologies.

In 1435 “Alberti published the treatise On Painting, leading to inventors using the camera obscura to automate perspectival drawing, and, within decades, Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot industrialised it by inventing photography.“⁸ The iPhone took photography to a final stage of everyday use and empowered potentially everyone to be an innovator, to have a new take on and picture of the world! “Did Alberti imagine streaming media when he wrote On Painting? Imagine the value unleashed by 21st-century infrastructure of media—from streaming to 3D—which supports decades, even centuries, of progress.”⁹

While this book takes a closer look at examples of re-designing the systems of arts, culture and creative industries, it is not devoted to a historical analysis or even a language-sensitive analysis of historical Renaissance. While some authors here find analogies between the present-day and previous Renaissances, we did not look into the social settings of these times. Instead, this book works with an image, a perception of the historical Renaissance—but this picture does not necessarily resemble more rigorously historical representations of those earlier Renaissances that we get from scholars of the subject. For example, the word “art“ was not used in Renaissance times as we understand that term today. In fact, Science and Art were not distinguished as separate fields in the historical Renaissance as they are today.

¹ Charles Landry

² https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/mariana-mazzucato-on-rethinking-the-state/

³ https://www.c40.org/what-we-do/building-a-movement/cities-race-to-zero/

⁴ https://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/content/why-creativity-why-cities

⁵ https://www.digitaleurope.org/about-us/

⁶ Charles Landry

⁷ von der Leyen, https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/index_en

⁸ Ali Hossaini

⁹ Ali Hossaini

¹⁰ Charles Landry

¹¹ Pier Luigi Sacco

¹² Johannes Ebert

¹³ Geoff Mulgan

The new mobility—especially in large cities—is creating an acute need for innovation in the industry far beyond the ecological-technological sphere. Thus, data- and content-based business models are becoming a central component of a sustainable business model. For the automotive industry (as for many other industries), it will also be a matter of crossing previous industry boundaries and working in an interdisciplinary manner in order to remain capable of innovation. Above all, however, companies will have to deal more and more intensively with the future. We often still cling to the idea that we can’t determine the future, but that it will be determined. But that may prove to be a mistake. Instead, we will have to create tools and methods to really look ahead. Only in this way will the picture emerge toward which we must work.

In 2019, nextMedia.Hamburg and the Cross Innovation Hub (part of Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft mbH) developed Content Foresight, a unique, Europe-wide tool for bringing together different perspectives, different know-how, different inspirations, and also very different creative approaches in a media- and technology-diffuse world. Content Foresight has since proven to be a highly effective method for making reliable predictions for the content industry based on creative input and interdisciplinary collaboration with other industries. Just one example: If autonomous driving becomes established in the medium term, mobility providers in particular will have to become much more involved in other business areas than before. Because when the car drives itself, drivers will have time and space for new forms of occupation, new forms of media use. This, in turn, requires creative and content-related input, i.e., content! And that promises enormous potential for creative and media professionals.

In our view, Strategic Foresight is therefore the most suitable method for bringing together areas that are supposedly alien to one another to exchange ideas and find concrete solutions to their current and future challenges. After all, looking into the future promotes innovation today. However, companies still too often face major hurdles in perceiving and exploiting this potential. But simply dealing with a time horizon of five years is still unusual in companies. In order to better cope with the approaching, rapid changes and not only remain capable of acting, but also to be able to shape the future, even more courage and willingness to take risks will be required in the future.

This willingness also includes cooperation across industry and company boundaries. Most industries and management strategies still seem to be unfamiliar with open and cross-innovation processes. Yet the increasing complexity of our world is due not least to the convergence of markets and industries. So while classic competitive thinking can make long-term innovation even more difficult, it is often neutral and supra-organisational approaches that can create new spaces of opportunity and change mindsets. And above all, the involvement of the creative industries creates additional potential. Their ways of thinking and working not only provide new impetus for the innovation process itself, but are also becoming indispensable in view of the need to shape a new, sustainable, equitable future.

Picture below: Michail Paweletz reads 2034, Copyright: Laura Müller

II.

2029. The project team of MaibornWolff and pilot Hamburg planned the next step: With S.T.E.P—the Seamless Travel Experience Platform—mobility and entertainment/information are individually tailored to the user. Instead of having to actively choose from countless options how to get from A to B and which content can be consumed on the way, a digital twin creates situationally optimal decision bases for seamless travel planning. The blockchain-based application already developed promises all-in-one processing. In a planning horizon of about five to 10 years, app chaos on smartphones will then be as much a thing of the past as login madness. Through a public-private ownership model, in which the public sector acts as a regulator, a critical mass of services and users* can be aggregated, which can fully keep an eye on the optimisation of passenger transport, independent of the economic success of individual providers.

So… You can’t do it without looking into the future. But… Everyone looks at the future differently. To find the best solution together, it is crucial to organise an exchange—and to learn from each other. This is the only way to create innovations.

If you want to be innovative tomorrow, you have to be open today, even for unusual input—and above all for new content!

Dr. Johanna Leuschen, Head of NDR Audio Lab (Norddeutscher Rundfunk)

„We believe that in the future we will always get the content that is best suited to our mood, in the current mobility situation, in the time available. The keyword here is personalisation. The user focus is and will remain essential. For journalism, AI could be useful in an assisting role: Tasks that do not necessarily require creativity (weather, election or sports results) could be taken over by algorithms. Then journalists could devote themselves entirely to creative and research-intensive topics. And we assume that companies in general, not just content providers, should look at an audio and voice strategy and tailor their offerings for a voice-driven world in the long term. Discoverability is going to be a big challenge going forward.“

Harnessing the potential of art in reshaping the European economy, in line with the goals formulated in the EU Green Deal and New European Bauhaus, is the central concern of the 12 S+T+ARTS residencies planned for 2021/22. Together with external experts from science, society, politics and business, artists will be invited to act as catalysts for change and develop concepts for a sustainable future.

As a creator of new ideas, a mediator between science and society, and a facilitator of creative, social and communicative skills, art holds enormous potential for research and education. In view of current fields of action, a closing of ranks between science and art is urgently needed, and the potential that their entanglement holds must be exploited.

TRANSFORM – Digital and Social Transformation through New Directions in Research and University Education is a cooperative project of Johannes Kepler University Linz, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Danube University Krems and Ars Electronica, financially enabled by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.
Zur Website

Manifest Innovation durch Universitas – written by Johannes Kepler University and the University of Applied Arts
See here: www.jku.at/en/manifest

The Pangolin Scales (2020)
Information & Videos at: Ars Electronica Festival 2020; Institutswebsite

All LIT Specialcall Ars Electronica Projects 2020: https://www.jku.at/ars-electronica-2020-in-keplers-garden/

All LIT Specialcall Ars Electronica Projects 2021: https://www.jku.at/ars-electronica-2021-a-new-digital-deal/

S+T+ARTS Regional Centres | Repairing the Present (2021/22)
The Johannes Kepler University is a scientific partner in the Challenge nº2: Circular Futures.

Artificial intelligence is already much better at tasks that are narrowly defined, such as recognising images, graphic patterns, sounds, and processing large data sets. Human intelligence still has the upper hand in a number of cognitive and emotional tasks, in the ability to generalise, or to diametrically change the topics it deals with in a fraction of a second. But how long will this be the case? We don’t quite know yet, but we do know that billions of euros are being invested in the world’s largest laboratories in the development of so-called general artificial intelligence that could match human intelligence on these complex issues. However, one thing is already quite clear. The interconnection and interaction between human and artificial intelligence will become a normal part of our lives. It may not even be necessary to use the future tense, as some hybrid systems already exist today. For example, to compensate for various cognitive disorders, so-called AI-based cognitive enhancers are already being used today. They are designed to treat multiple diagnoses and so Alzheimer’s patients have a good chance of seeing their condition improving soon. But what is to prevent these tools from being used on a large scale for ‚recreational‘ purposes? After all, who wouldn’t want to have a better memory, creativity or learn a foreign language faster?

Years of digitisation of cultural content have led to unprecedented accessibility and personalisation. Today, people can watch cultural content from anywhere and at any time. At the same time, the boundary between the producer of cultural content and its consumer is gradually blurring. Artificial intelligence, which first entered the field of art and culture through personalisation of offerings and preference tracking, is now connecting, reproducing and even creating new artistic products from cultural content—music, visual art and text. At the same time, it opens up completely new horizons for artists and scientists that were unknown to them. The question of whether “machines” will become artists is becoming ever more intense. Some today radically reject it, but in all likelihood we will soon also see in art and science a fusion of the human and the „machine“, produced by artificial intelligence.

stop it. The benefits of artificial intelligence for humanity are indisputable and will be enormous. Our task is not to underestimate its transformative potential but to grow with it. We must have the courage to change ourselves and society and find new qualities in the relationship between technology and man. If we try to preserve society as it used to be, it may have unforeseeable consequences for all of us.