In the beginning, Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik focused on “Image – Script – Number”, represented by prominent thinkers such as Horst Bredekamp (art history), Jochen Brüning (mathematics) and Friedrich Kittler (history and theory of culture). The consistent focus on the mediality and materiality of knowledge made it possible to take an innovative look at a wide range of interdisciplinary contexts. In a second phase, materiality in its aesthetic form came even more to the fore and enabled new forms of knowledge analysis at the design and collection level. Since 2021, this analysis has been expanded and supplemented by social anthropological perspectives and questions of knowledge transfer as genuine sites of inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge production.

As of spring 2025, the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik has a new short title: Zentrum für Kulturtechnik. The new abbreviation – ZfK – can also be found in the new logo.

The new logo unites the three phases: Aesthetically and visually based on Latin letters, it can be read as an abbreviation for “Zentrum für Kulturtechnik”. In fact, however, the characters are taken from Unicode, i.e. the paradoxical attempt to unite the diversity of the world’s more than 110,000 fonts in one code without forming a semantic unit. The logo thus captures the challenge of dealing with irreducibly diverse knowledge in an image that is both legible and illegible: the Z is also a mathematical symbol, the f is taken from the Mongolian Phagba script and the K from the ancient Lycian language. As individual characters, they are neither arbitrary nor can they be brought into a closed system of meaning. Each use is potentially a vulnerable argument. The reflexive paradox is programmatic for the work on and with cultural techniques, understood as media of distancing, through which understanding becomes possible in the first place. On this basis, ZfK tests the interaction of material- and collection-based research, the opening up of disciplinary epistemologies and the third mission: knowledge exchange with society and outreach as the third pillar of the university.