HORIZON Webinars

In this introductory episode of The Signal Room , theatre director, dramaturg and creative leader Shona Benson joins moderator Michael Frugtniet for a wide-ranging conversation about the arts, human connection and the world in which young people are now growing up. Drawing on Shona’s decades of experience across theatre and education, the discussion begins with the distinctive power of live perfor...

In this Signal Room conversation, artist Lida Sherafatmand joins Michael Frugtniet to explore what art can offer a world that has become increasingly loud, hurried and difficult to inhabit. Lida traces the origins of Florescencism—her artistic and cultural philosophy of human flowering—from her childhood in Iran, her experience of displacement and her early discovery of flowers as a quiet, non-ver...

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, cul...

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 he...

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 o...

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, disci...

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...

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, tech...

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, b...

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 exp...

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...