Humboldt Futures

The Berlin Humboldt Forum is causing intense debates: From its exterior which is a replica of the Berlin Palace, resulting into an urban wasteland and heat island, to its exhibits whose origins and ownership are largely unclear, the Forum offers a huge potential for future development. This potential, which encompasses many of the relevant challenges of our time, has so far been addressed primarily in conventional formats such as text contributions, panel discussions and workshops. But this is not enough.

Using the means of the 21st century, Humboldt Futures aims at contributing to transforming these challenges into a productive accelerator for future visions. With a Digital Twin of the Humboldt Forum as its basis, Humboldt Futures opens the Forum to the more than 5 billion people and communities worldwide who have Internet access.

Acknowledging that play is foundational for the generation of culture, Humboldt Futures refers to “Homo Ludens” (1938), the study of the play elements in culture by the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga.

As the Forum’s Digital Twin, Humboldt Futures is a projection surface as well as an experimentation space, opening an arena for playful discussion around the big issues of our time: Who owns the cultural heritage? Whose voices dominate the discourses and which minorities remain marginalized and invisible? How does climate injustice feel like? How to envision transcultural narratives that go beyond the focusing on the narrow human interests in the Anthropocene?

Join this event, in collaboration between Hybrid Space Lab and gamelab.berlin, a research and development platform of Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.