GLOBART Academy 2014

globart-academy-2014-banner

Do we really have problems in understanding the world today – or are the patterns by which we understand just not sufficient anymore?

The world has become very complex. The loss of control cannot be compensated by simply retrieving information on the most distant events via our smartphone, like a form of global simultaneousness. The dynamics of a borderless finance, re-nationalisation and de-secularisation as a trigger of geopolitical uncertainty, technological revolutions with all their bright and dark sides: we know countless details from all these zones of new in-clarity, but the overall picture remains invisible.
+++
Simultaneously we realise with astonishment, that essential phenomena influencing our daily lives are invisible. Gravitation, thought, time, genes, trust – that’s what makes us people curious to see behind the curtain. They are the driving force for research and our exploratory spirit and therefore urge us to dig deeper into the secrets of our world.

As the years before, the GLOBART Academy as a workshop for future related topics will pursue some of these questions:

Will the universe, whose most distant galaxies we restlessly try to make visible, become an invisibly dump or a source of new discoveries for the human kind? What is a transparent society – and how can we return to being digitally invisible and thereby save our privacy? What constitutes our thinking? Do invisible time regimes determine our lives? What does that do to us? Does social acceleration possibly lead to social alienation? Why is laughter contagious? What is the role of intuitive communication and how can mirror neurons influence the success of therapeutic processes? Can robots make our emotions and empathy visible? Does the classification of our most confidential thoughts follow the facial recognition? Genes are also invisible to the human eye. They are, as stated by Markus Hengstschläger, like pencil and paper. Can we maybe use them to write our lives’ history by ourselves?

At the GLOBART Academy we want to confront ourselves with these subjects. We look forward to four exciting days, which will show the possibilities of making things visible by means of our hearts, hands and brains. New stories and innovative practices will offer a path to spirited discussions and a generation-friendly future.