Innovate & Experiment

Part of Krems Culture Stacks
at the Department for Arts & Cultural Studies
University for Continuing Education Krems

courses listed below: Image Forensics Lab, AI and the Cultural Imagination, Games as Culture, Sound, Space, and the City

Some topics arrive before the textbooks do. Innovate & Experiment Stacks are built around questions that are timely, emerging, or underrepresented in standard academic curricula — not because they are fashionable, but because they genuinely need serious attention right now. The format follows the content: if a topic calls for a workshop, it gets one. If it calls for a seminar, a lab, a field visit, or a combination of all three, that is what it gets.

These Stacks are not about testing new pedagogy for its own sake. They are about finding the format that best serves a specific topic and a specific group of people — and being willing to try something that has not been done before when that is what the content requires.

Each Innovate & Experiment Stack begins with a question the department believes deserves more attention than it is currently getting — in cultural studies, media studies, digital culture, or at the intersection of arts and other fields. The format is chosen to match the content and the audience, not the other way around. Some offerings will look like intensive seminars. Others will look like labs, workshops, or collaborative research sessions. What they share is a commitment to taking the topic seriously and giving participants real tools to engage with it.

• Content that is current, emerging, or at the edge of established disciplinary boundaries
• Format chosen to fit the topic — expect variety across different Stacks
• Accessible to participants from outside arts and cultural studies — several offerings in this category are relevant to professionals from journalism, law, communications, digital media, and other fields
• Flexible participation: Observer, Participant, or Crediting tier — full details on each individual Stack page

All Innovate & Experiment Stacks are available at three levels. Full details on access, assessment, and credits are on each individual Stack page.

Image Forensics Lab
Innovate & Experiment · 6 credits · Online — synchronous sessions + async work · English
How do you know whether an image is real? This Stack draws on current research in image analysis, media studies, and visual culture to develop practical and theoretical tools for reading images critically. Relevant to professionals from journalism, law, communications, cultural heritage, and digital media — not only to arts and cultural studies specialists. Enrolment details to follow.
→ Notify me when enrolment opens

Photography Futures
6 credits · Intensive Weekend Block · Online · English
From analog to digital to AI. Photography has changed rapidly over the last 50 years. Here you can understand and be a part of its developments 
→ [Notify me when enrolment opens](link to interest form)

AI and the Cultural Imagination
Innovate & Experiment · 6 credits · Online or Hybrid · English
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how stories are told, how images are made, how music is composed, and how cultural heritage is documented and accessed. This Stack examines those shifts critically — not from a technical standpoint, but from the perspective of cultural studies, media theory, and the history of technology and imagination. For anyone working at the intersection of culture and digital transformation.
→ Register interest

Games as Culture
Innovate & Experiment · 6 credits · Format TBA · English / German
Video games are one of the dominant cultural forms of the past four decades — and one of the least studied in traditional humanities programmes. This Stack approaches games as cultural objects: their narrative structures, their visual languages, their relationship to memory and identity, and what they tell us about the societies that make and play them.
→ Register interest

Sound, Space, and the City
Innovate & Experiment · 6 credits · Format TBA · German / English
An experimental Stack exploring how sound shapes urban experience — from acoustic ecology and noise politics to soundscape composition and the sonic history of Krems. Developed in collaboration with sound artists and urban researchers. Details to follow.
→ Register interest

Innovate & Experiment is one of four categories within Krems Culture Stacks, the microcredential system of the Department for Arts & Cultural Studies at the Universität für Weiterbildung Krems. Credits earned at Crediting tier are stackable toward future Certificate Programs and Master's programmes at UWK, and portable to other institutions via standard academic transcript.

→ Back to Krems Culture Stacks — all categories
→ Contact the department