BaFID at the Nuremberg Digital Festival 2025: Why tech cannot do without culture
From 30 June to 9 July 2025, the Nürnberg Digital Festival (NUEDIGITAL) once again transformed the metropolitan region into a hub for digital issues of the future. Under the motto ‘TECH to the PEOPLE,’ more than 18,000 participants from the worlds of business, science, education, and culture gathered to discuss artificial intelligence, sustainability, digital ethics, and more. At the heart of the action: the Bavarian Research Centre for Interreligious Discourse (BaFID).
Two contributions—one goal: thinking about technology in human terms
The events „Deus Machinae: Wer huldigt dem Maschinengott?“ by Ramy Abdin, M.A., and „(Mit) Gott spielen: Götter und Gottesbilder in Videogames“ by Dr. Nathanael Riemer BaFID introduced two unusual but highly topical themes into the digital discourse: the religious content of modern technological utopias and the portrayal of gods and religion in computer games.
At first glance, the cultural studies digression resonated deeply with the digital zeitgeist. Where AI systems make decisions and technology shapes everyday life, new questions arise about meaning, responsibility, and worldviews. Who else but the humanities could offer guidance here?
Why the humanities belong at a tech festival
Technology is changing our lives, beliefs, communication, and self-perception. Humanities scholars help us to reflect on the effects of these changes, critically accompany them, and place them in a cultural context.
These contributions were indispensable, especially in an open, interdisciplinary format such as NUEDIGITAL: they created connections between data and interpretation, between machine logic and human experience.