Claire Isabel Webb
Claire Isabel Webb directed the Future Humans program at the Berggruen Institute, where she explored the radical scientific transformations shaping life, mind, and outer space. A historian and theorist, her work bridges the history of biology and space exploration, speculative science, and experimental art and storytelling. She writes and presents for popular science audiences, in academic journals and workshops, and in art publications and performances.
Webb earned her PhD from MIT in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS). Her book project, Reflexive Alienation, traces how scientists have developed experimental practices to anticipate alien life, even in the face of its enduring unknowability. As the founder and director of Future Humans, she led projects bridging science, philosophy, technology, and art, including Próxima Kosmos, Future Wunderkammer, and Vaster Than Empires. From 2023 to 2026, she was the convenor of a Berggruen Institute workshop on the philosophy and future of consciousness.
By Claire Isabel Webb
Proxima Kósmos at Getty PST Open House
Planetary Summit Speakers
Future Histories of Life, Otherwise
Fiction and Futures
“It’s About the Present and Future, Simultaneously,” Interview with Qiufan (Stanley) Chen
“The Ultimate Expressions of Very Long Linages,” Interview with Ken Liu
“What is Collective Intelligence?”
“Being Human is About Storytelling,” Interview with Claire Isabel Webb
“Take the Broadest Temporal View,” Interview with Theo Downes-Le Guin
Chapter 4: Future Technê Summit - FORMING INTELLIGENCE
Chapter 3: Narrating the Future
Chapter 2: Ipseity
Chapter 1: Air Age Blueprint
Assembly Theory and the Complexity of Life
Reflexive Alienation: Pondering Cosmic Otherness with Dario Robleto
Cosmic vision
Future Humans Theme Explores the Question: “What Will Life Become?”
Multispecies Constitution Project: Meeting 1
Berggruen Institute Hosts What Will Life Become? Conference on Technology and the Human
Berggruen Fellows Aim to Reinvent Governance, Imagine Radically Different Futures for Global Systems and Institutions
