1 day ago

The Signal Room - Special with Susan Magsamen

What do young people need not simply to cope with the future, but to flourish within it? In this special introduction to The Signal Room, Shona Benson sits down with Susan Magsamen, founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint. Their conversation explores the essential role of art, culture and creative expression in human development—and why these capacities matter even more in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, digital connectivity and social fragmentation. Susan reflects on the growing evidence behind the arts and health, the importance of lived and Indigenous knowledge, and the need to place technology in service of humanity rather than the other way around. At the heart of the discussion is a more urgent proposition: young people do not simply need to be consulted. They need to be heard, valued and involved in the decisions shaping their lives. Drawing on a major youth-led research initiative involving more than 1,100 young people and their families, Susan explains why creative expression is not an optional extra, but a vital means of connection, meaning-making and everyday wellbeing. This conversation sets the foundation for The Signal Room: a space in which young people are not spoken for, but invited to speak—and where listening must lead to action.

54 min

21 Jun

The Signal Room - Introduction Episode with Fumiko Green

What happens when peace stops being an abstract idea and begins with something more immediate: knowing another person? In this Horizon Special Dialogue, Michael Frugtniet speaks with Fumiko “Miko” Green about the simple conviction at the heart of Miko’s World: when people become real to us, conflict is no longer distant or anonymous. Friendship gives names, faces and memories to those whom news headlines too easily reduce to numbers. Their conversation explores why children often cross cultural and linguistic boundaries more naturally than adults; why play, music, food and shared experience can achieve what formal peace education cannot; and why digital connection is most powerful when it supports, rather than replaces, human encounter. Miko also traces the remarkable Peace Violin journey, including instruments marked by Hiroshima and the Holocaust, and considers how music can carry difficult histories into the hands of a new generation. The discussion then looks ahead to The Signal Room: a space in which young people will not simply be discussed, studied or spoken for, but invited to speak and be heard. At its centre is a proposition both simple and demanding: peace may begin before policy, through the friendships we make and the people we learn to recognise as our own. Produced by Horizon with The Age of Culture Project and Atlas, in collaboration with Miko’s World.

1hr 8min

8 Jun

The Horizon Settlement with D. Paul Schafer

In the closing episode, Michael Frugtniet is joined by D. Paul Schafer to draw together the central arguments of the season and ask what now becomes possible. This is not a conclusion in the conventional sense, but a first settlement of the terrain: what the series has clarified, where tensions remain, and what kind of cultural framework may be needed for the age ahead. Returning to the question of culture as a governing layer, the conversation reflects on systems, value, technology, education and human continuity — and begins to define the basis for a more formal Horizon view.

1hr 1min

8 Jun

The Automation of the Human with Dr. Jayfus Doswell and Mallika Auplish

In this episode, Michael Frugtniet is joined by Dr. Jayfus Doswell and Mallika Auplish to examine AI not simply as a technological tool, but as a new form of intelligence infrastructure shaping judgment, learning, communication, evidence, health systems, markets and public decision-making. The conversation moves beyond panic or blind optimism to ask what happens when human attention, memory, discipline and agency are increasingly mediated by algorithmic systems. It argues that AI governance cannot be separated from cultural maturity, institutional accountability and the protection of human judgment.

51 min

8 Jun

Culture Has Been Domesticated with Peter Mousaferiadis

In this episode, Michael Frugtniet is joined by Peter Mousaferiadis to examine why culture is so often celebrated in public language while remaining structurally weak in policy, education, technology and civic life. The conversation asks how culture has been narrowed into manageable categories — arts, heritage, identity, tourism, creative industries or community programming — and what is lost when it is treated as symbolic rather than foundational. Moving from cultural policy to intercultural confluence and neuroscience, the episode explores what it would mean for culture to become civic infrastructure: a living system through which societies build trust, belonging, imagination and shared meaning.

1hr 9min

8 Jun

The System is Functioning. Society is Not, with Dr. Mira Sartika and Prof Nancy Duxbury

This episode asks whether modern society’s deepest failures are really failures of execution — or signs that our systems are succeeding according to the wrong assumptions. Michael Frugtniet leads a conversation alongside Dr. Mira Sartika and Professor Nancy Duxbury on the widening gap between institutional performance and lived human coherence: economies may grow, policies may be implemented, technologies may advance, yet communities still experience fragmentation, distrust, anxiety and loss of belonging. The episode positions culture as a source of repair, wisdom and collective wellbeing, asking what it would mean to design systems around human continuity rather than efficiency alone.

58 min

8 Jun

The Fiction of Value with Dr. Diane Dodd and Dr. Thomas Legrand

This episode examines how modern societies define value — and what becomes invisible when value is reduced to price, productivity or growth. Through a conversation grounded in food systems, ecology, craft, place and public meaning, Michael Frugtniet, Dr. Diane Dodd and Dr. Thomas Legrand explore how market language often fails to recognise the things that hold communities together: care, memory, biodiversity, local knowledge and cultural continuity. The episode asks whether a Cultural Age requires a broader public vocabulary of value, one capable of protecting what cannot easily be measured but should not be lost.

58 min

8 Jun

The Cultural Age with D. Paul Schafer

This foundational episode opens the series by returning to the intellectual roots of The Age of Culture Project. In conversation with Michael Frugtniet, D. Paul Schafer reflects on the journey from the Economic Age to the possibility of a Cultural Age, asking whether economics, while one of humanity’s great organising achievements, is now too narrow a framework to guide the future. The episode explores culture not as a sector or leisure activity, but as the “complex whole” through which societies understand meaning, value, wellbeing, responsibility and continuity.

1hr 2min

8 Jun

Michael's Monologue

Michael Frugtniet opens the series with a direct reflection on the condition of contemporary society: systems are becoming more efficient, yet public trust, social coherence, meaning and continuity feel increasingly fragile. The monologue frames culture as the missing operating system beneath economics, technology, education and governance — not a decorative layer, but the deeper structure through which societies interpret value, hold memory, form judgment and decide what kind of future is worth building. It sets the central proposition for the season: that the crisis of the present is cultural before it is merely economic or technological.

36 min

HORIZON Webinars

Episodes

The Signal Room - Special with Susan Magsamen

The Signal Room - Introduction Episode with Fumiko Green

The Horizon Settlement with D. Paul Schafer

The Automation of the Human with Dr. Jayfus Doswell and Mallika Auplish

Culture Has Been Domesticated with Peter Mousaferiadis

The System is Functioning. Society is Not, with Dr. Mira Sartika and Prof Nancy Duxbury

The Fiction of Value with Dr. Diane Dodd and Dr. Thomas Legrand

The Cultural Age with D. Paul Schafer

Michael's Monologue

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