Start with Baxter. That’s a human-friendly Rethink Robotics industrial robot that looks like a hulking fullback on a golf cart. Add dancers and audience members. You teach Baxter how to move – as “naturally” as we do. What you then get at Emerge 2015 is a team of artists and roboticists creating performance art and a laboratory working session that imagines positive – though not simplistic – futures for human/robot relations. Ars Robotica is a multi-year project that brings together artists, scientists, designers, and engineers to advance research in robotics and to produce creative performances. It’s led by Lance Gharavi and students and faculty at ASU’s School of Film, Dance + Theatre. In partnership with Srikanth Saripalli and his crowd at the School of Earth + Space Exploration. For Emerge 2015 you – the audience – gets involved in conducting on-site research in performance. Our roboticists want to learn about the performance of materials, technologies, processes, and systems. Our theater collaborators are just as concerned with the performance of organic autonomous systems – you.