Phillip Engelhardt at Mozilla Festival 2026
From October 28 to 30, 2026, Phillip Engelhardt conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona as part of project P1 “Pioneer Communities”. Under this year’s theme, “Wilding”, more than 2,000 people from numerous pioneer communities, NGOs and civil society initiatives came together at the Recinte Fabra i Coats for the 16th time. The central question was how digital technologies and AI can grow beyond the structures of Big Tech and enable new forms of communal living.
Phillip’s ethnography explored how people at MozFest communicate about the future of AI and what role the idea of Public AI plays in this: an AI imagined not as a commercial product but as an infrastructure of public life.
The findings of this research stay are intended to help trace where the visions come from that shape the societal image of the future of AI, and to reconstruct how these visions come together to form an overarching imaginative landscape of AI.
6. November 2026
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp
ZeMKI, Center for Media, Communication and Information Research
University of Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67620
Assistent Mrs. Schober: +49 421 218-67603
E-mail: andreas.hepp@uni-bremen.de
