James Murdoch and Kathryn Murdoch are teaming up with Art Basel parent company MCH Group to create a new festival that aims to rival the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Festival of Ideas and other “creativity”-driven gatherings of the world’s rich and powerful.
While details are still scarce and no formal announcement has been made, vanity fairNate Freeman reports that he confirmed this ongoing activity through multiple sources. According to Freeman, the project is a joint venture between Lupa Systems, James Murdoch’s investment company, which holds a controlling interest in MCH, and Futurific, the investment company of James Murdoch. A brief history of the futurefocusing on the people working to solve society’s most pressing problems. Based on the available material, Futurific’s central focus appears to have been the promotion of “protopia,” an wired Co-founder Kevin Kelly describes a vision of progressive social progress.
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The joint venture, set to debut in 2028, will be called the Futurific Institute and will be led by CEO Rachel Goslins, the former executive director of the Milken Institute’s Center on the American Dream. It is expected to take place in Basel, Switzerland, during the summer.
In an interview with NPR during the 2024 PBS series premiere, Kathryn Murdoch said the idea for “Futurific” and its emphasis on archetypes stemmed from a conversation with her daughter, who noted that pop culture overwhelmingly depicts dystopias rather than hopeful visions of the future.
“The whole concept actually started when my daughter told me she didn’t think there was any hope for the future,” she said. “I’m very frustrated by this because I’ve been working on democracy and climate change issues for a long time.”
Murdoch, a long-time environmental activist, said the series and the broader “Real Utopia” framework aim to combat the paralysis caused by dire climate warnings – as dramatized in the 2021 film Don’t look up——Can be produced.
“We haven’t done a very good job of showing what the world would look like if we took action,” Murdoch said.
As for what the Institute of the Future will actually look like, Freeman’s sources are less clear, though they offer a wide range of comparisons, from the Venice Biennale and the St. Louis World’s Fair to Burning Man and TED talks. The general idea seems to be to combine art, culture, technology and future problem solving into a single event.
“It’s like a contemporary riff on the World’s Fair,” one source said. vanity fair.
