Since 2011, the BEYOND Festival has been a creative fusion of science, technology and media art as well as an experimental laboratory for new art forms and reflections on the social impact of new technologies in a global context.
The festival, whose organizers include Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, the ZKM and the City of Karlsruhe, is all about “future design” and holds a symposium that both exhibits and allows for debate and discussion on a wide range of art formats, media and the latest technologies, for example 3D, virtual reality and artificial and artistic intelligence. The festival’s “Future Design” component explores the art of thinking about the future and how we might actively and creatively shape that future on the basis of humanistic values. Topics include the meaning of universal human rights, individual freedom, sexual emancipation and responsibility for the environment and our planet.
We believe that shaping the future means working with artists, thinkers, scientists, engineers, economists, hackers and millennials, digital natives and the young at heart from all over the world. And by »working with« we don’t just mean creating a dialog but also unleashing the imagination in order to allow for the emergence of new great narratives of what is to come.
At BEYOND, artists don’t simply create the latest media artworks. They also produce new narratives for the future that go beyond the imitation of life as we know it and seek to dissolve the antagonism between nature and technology. The result is a festival shaped by international partnerships and participation that picks up on and presents trends and research in digitization and that projects attractive improbabilities and new narratives for the 21st century into the future.
