Ars Electronica Futurelab director Hideaki Ogawa taught an online course entitled “Artistic Journalism” at Keio University SFC (Shonan Fujisawa Campus). This experimental series of classes discusses artistic journalism through online lectures, online guided tours and dialogues with the Ars Electronica Center.

In the year 2020, we were faced with Covid-19 and the various social changes cascading from it. This virus spreads through physical connections between people, and it also affects the various traditions, cultures and systems that humanity has created analogously.
At the same time, the world built by the digital revolution has strengthened our virtual connections, and cutting-edge technologies such as media, bio, nano, AI, robotics, and space are interacting with the ever-changing global landscape, inviting us into the unknown.
How are we going to face these dramatic changes? How can we find our own compass to navigate the future? How are we going to live in the new future? We believe that we need a more three-dimensional, interdisciplinary, experiential forum for discussion that cannot be shared by traditional media journalism.
In this course, we envision Artistic Journalism as a new medium, a new place, and a new system to experience and discuss the future on a broad scale. Throughout history, mankind has created the future through the invention of new arts and technologies to overcome various difficulties.
Through the activities of Ars Electronica, we will create a dialogue with new knowledge that cannot be conveyed by books, newspapers and online media alone, and discuss how this dialogue can be applied to future policy.