Symposium

Symposium Future Design

"The best way to predict the future is to shape it ourselves"

Within recent years our festival has increasingly gained international significance through our symposium “Future Design”.
This is a worldwide unique and radical approach that aims at critically reflecting upon our current state of knowledge and possible future scenarios. We desire to awaken the “Future Designer” within everyone.

To shape the future for us means to collaborate, create dialogue and to provide a platform where new narratives, that reach beyond our power of imagination, can be formulated. We can achieve this by involving artists, thinkers, scientists, engineers, economists, hackers, “Millenials” and “Digital Narratives” from around the globe.

Heed to us, when we present to you in our symposium FUTURE DESIGN the unique and radical triad of science, art and technology. This year we dedicate ourselves to virtual reality, artistic and artificial intelligence and post-capitalism to open doors that appear unimaginable to open at this moment.

Prizes and Awards

Best Leading Thought Award

A thought, a theory, a concept - this is necessary to initiate a change and redesign the future. The winner is the person who presents a promising approach to shaping the future in a positive way.

Reason given by Ludger Pfanz for the election of the prizewinner:

In the biomass of terrestrial animals, wild animals are only 2.8 percent. All other animals live just to be killed or to feed us. We asked ourselves which idea at our "Future Design Symposium" has the greatest potential to reduce suffering. Billions of animals suffer from tormenting in mass animal husbandry. The research to breed "culture meat" derived from stem cells has not only the potential to overcome hunger in the world, but also to abolish the torturing of sensitive animals, to return 70% of the agricultural lands to nature and to reduce global warming by 25%.

The „Best Leading Thought Award“ 2018 goes to Prof. Dr. Mark Post and his project "Cultured Meat".

Best Film Award

Every year the BEYOND festival presents different film genres and media. The award recognises films that address the past, present and the modern way of life, whilst simultaneously drawing attention to the future as a bearer of hope.

Jury Members were Sebastian Cramer, Johanna Schäfer, Victor van Wetten, Lauren Moffatt, Gülsel Özkan and Sönke Kirchhof.

Reasons given by the jury for its choice:

As a jury, it is always difficult to make a choice between very different films, and has been particularly true for the films presented at this year's BEYOND festival. All submissions were unique in their message, form, content and production, competing on a high level of quality. One of the central criteria for the jury was the question whether the film reflects an original vision of the future. The film we agreed on, takes its audience on a journey through a world, that is at first hard to grasp from the very subjective pint of view the film offers. Is this the end of the world, are we the last survivors looking at the leftovers of human society in a post-apocalyptic scenario? The film we want to award with the BEYOND-Best Film Award tonight tonight is innovative and immersive in its visual language; it uses visual effects in an inconspicuous, delicate manner, that blends smoothly with the documentary character of the material. Though the vision for the future the film paints is rather dark, the jury was also convinced by the subtle humour that shines through at moments and lift the heavy weight of disaster. Such as the final self-hypnothic credo of the film, “You can do it, you can do it.”

Best Art Award

Light and sound art, photography, painting, installations, VR and 3D - art has many facets and offers numerous possibilities to stage and depict them. The award recognises the most innovative artistic representation.

In this edition of Beyond Future Design Festival, 2018, I was asked to give a prize for Best Award to one artist, one work present in the exhibition „Sapiens- We Buy Storms“.
After seeing all the works, and repeating this every day, I have no doubt in my decision to give the prize to all artists, there was no moment for competition, quite the opposite, this was the right moment to emphasize the equilibrium and connections the Exhibition acquired. No competition, no tops rather a permanent questioning work in progress.

(João Tabarra, HfG Professor for Moving Images)