The Future Starts Here:
Meet Our FF 2026 Keynotes
We’re thrilled to reveal the opening and closing keynote speakers for Fantastic Futures 2026! Join us as inspiring experts, visionary thinkers, and leading voices come together to explore what lies ahead at the intersection of AI, culture, and heritage. Our keynote speakers will share fresh perspectives, bold ideas, and insights into how AI is shaping the ways we preserve, understand, and engage with our cultural heritage.
Opening Keynote:
After the Airshow: Bubbles, Crashes, and Institutions
Every new technology attracts a wave of ventures. Drawing on his book Bubbles and Crashes and on a systems-based view of strategy, David Kirsch argues that speculative bubbles are how a society discovers — by trial, error, and other people’s money — what a socio-technical system can actually support, and that the purposes a technology serves arrive not in the order imagination supplies them, but in the order its bottlenecks resolve. The history of American aviation, from wingwalkers to the DC-3, shows that the decisive bottlenecks were institutional, not technical, and that the infrastructure on which commercial flight depended was built by public institutions pursuing purposes of their own. Public AI is in its airshow era, and its binding constraint is trust. The question for memory institutions is not whether they will be part of what comes next, but which role in that history they are about to play.
Closing Keynote:
Escaping the Technology Trap, Reclaiming Liberalitas: Fostering Community Enablement in the Age of AI
As cultural heritage institutions navigate generative AI, the profession faces escalating demands to open digitized collections for commercial model training and severe, systemic defunding of infrastructure that enables us to understand our world. Grounded in Carl Benedikt Frey’s The Technology Trap and Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism, this closing keynote explores historical cycles of disruption and how the erosion of classical liberalitas—the civic duty to the common good—paved the way for privatizing what was built for the public good. Synthesizing themes across Fantastic Futures, Rosalyn Metz reframes cultural heritage organizations as vital “third spaces”, showing us how, through ongoing, adaptive community dialogues, we can enable communities and ensure shared knowledge endures for generations to come.
Not registered for the conference yet? Now is the time to secure your spot! On-site attendance is already fully booked, but you can still join Fantastic Futures 2026 online and be part of the conversation wherever you are. Register now and don’t miss this year’s inspiring programme, keynote talks, and discussions on the future of AI, culture, and heritage. You can find the full programme at the following link.
