SFB 1567
Virtual environments
The virtual world is increasingly becoming normalised. The implications and consequences of this trend are being explored by more than 50 researchers in this Collaborative Research Centre.
Today, virtuality is a driving force for social and cultural transformation processes. As its manifestations have become more and more diverse, it’s been losing the nimbus of the extraordinary and has become more and more normalised within countless aspects of everyday life. This is where the SFB comes in, by looking at knowledge contents, practices, forms of debate and networking dynamics.
The 13 sub-projects investigate the ways in which social subsystems implement virtuality and the ramifications this has for individual subjects and their constitution, for real-life and aesthetic practices, as well as for social organisations and operations. All these projects share a common focus on how our concept of science and academia is changing and how this affects everyday activities, not only in research and teaching, but also in administration and knowledge management, in public relations and research data management beyond the academic sphere.
In close consultation with the sub-projects, which are largely related to contemporary issues, the SFB is developing the Virtual University. It is designed to provide a joint framework that combines moments of self-reflection with strategies of science communication to the public and provides a spatial and technical infrastructure to do justice to the specific features of the field of virtual living environments.
