The Moovy Symposium 2025 brought together artists, researchers, technology enthusiasts, and cultural practitioners to engage in a shared discussion on digitality, democracy, and culture. Over the course of two days, the German Dance Archive Cologne became a space for exchange, networking, and collective reflection on how digital technologies are transforming art, culture, and society—and how these changes can be actively shaped.

A central concern of the symposium was to understand digital spaces as places of community: freely accessible, democratic, safe, and creative. Through lectures, discussions, and a hackathon, new ideas were developed, practical examples were shared, and concrete approaches to building public-interest-oriented digital structures in art and culture were explored.

The symposium opened with contributions by international guests Audrey Tang, former Digital Minister of Taiwan, and E. Glen Weyl, American economist at Microsoft Research and founder of RadicalxChange. Together with an international community of authors, they co-authored the visionary book Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy. In their contributions, they framed technology not as a threat, but as a driver of democratic participation and social collaboration, thereby setting the conceptual foundation for the days that followed.

Over two days, the symposium and hackathon offered an inspiring space for exchange and connection. The aim was to generate concrete impulses for the future of culture and digitality and to collaboratively develop sustainable, democratic, and commons-oriented digital perspectives for the arts and cultural sector.

The symposium was held in cooperation with the German Dance Archive Cologne. The conceptual development of the symposium was supported by the Kunststiftung NRW through a research grant awarded to Ágota Harmati, Artistic Director of Moovy.

At this point, we are publishing a selected contribution from the symposium that further explores key questions of digitality, art, and democratic participation.

In his contribution, Klaas Werner calls for rethinking and actively shaping art and culture in the digital age. He emphasizes that digital technologies are neither neutral nor equally distributed and argues for strategies to secure cultural relevance beyond the logics of major tech corporations. Cultural institutions, he suggests, must build long-term digital infrastructures, share resources, and advocate for open, commons-oriented systems. Art, cultural policy, and society as a whole share responsibility for developing digital spaces as sites of democratic participation, critical reflection, and creative future-making.

About Klaas Werner
Klaas Werner works at the intersection of theatre and media art. His research interests focus on the communicative and narrative potentials of contemporary media and technical infrastructures. As a founding member of the collective Anna Kpok, he has been developing theatre games, online and offline performances, installations, and interactive texts since 2009—works that can be described as playful encounters. Since 2015, he has held various roles at which he has directed since March 2025.