Festival attendees can learn ceramic techniques from Mesa Arts Center’s ceramic teaching artists and will be invited to make items depicting the future of food! Work created by both artists

Join MABEL, the Mobile Art-Based Engagement Lab, in the pursuit of experimental storytelling and mapping.  The trek of a lifetime, vegetables have quite a journey from farm to table. Where

What will our water taste like in the future? In this interactive exhibit, you will use your senses to explore –and shape– the future of our drinking water.

Sensory Kinship for the Third Kind is an artistic research project that engages in creative production through multi-sensory engagement with mushrooms. At Emerge, we will be exhibiting some of our

Fridge 2100 aims to paint unique pictures of our future and aspires to be an interactive experience. Don’t be fooled; despite Fridge 2100 looking quite “vintage” it actually gives its

This team of advanced sculptors and grad students from ASU explores a series of iterations on the theme of “Table”. Vessels for Table Universe!The seven vessels represent food, family, and

The current food system is facing great challenges from decreases in freshwater resources and arable lands, climate change, limited and unequal access to local fresh produce, and certainly not ready

This booth will provide a hands-on experience for attendees to use natural, sustainable homemade inks to contribute to a large-scale community drawing/Installation that will be displayed on the Mesa Arts Center railing system. The paper shapes used in this drawing project reflect key elements of Arizona State University students’ research about the futures of our oceans, energy, housing, education, and food. Brigham Young University art students will be managing the booth and assisting interested community members in participating in the drawing installation. ASU students will be on hand to share their futures-oriented research findings with a focus on the Phoenix/Mesa area.

Museum of Futures: Food for Thought, is an interactive exhibition that explores how, what and why we eat. Touch, taste and smell your way through this exhibition, with jellyfish, native

“ArtKitchenFerment” is an interactive art environment that engages with the processes, creative results, and byproducts of food fermentation. Part art installation, part interactive workshop, “ArtKitchenFerment” invites participants of all ages to expand their notions of beauty, use, taste, and liveliness in common fermented foods like sauerkraut and kombucha. Put on your apron and participate in a cabbage-dye art demonstration, compose a bacteria-inspired recipe poem, and make a piece of kombucha “leather” jewelry. Cook some books in our fermentation library, or watch an interactive video installation as you ponder the magical microbes that make up our unruly world!

Imagine a late-capitalist dystopian future in which individuals are held personally responsible for the climate crisis. Imagine a future where ubiquitous surveillance of individuals becomes the preferred method for curbing carbon emissions, where non-compliance results in serious penalties. The Food Carbon Footprint Index (FCFI) imagines just that vision of the future. FCFI invites participants to make meal decisions via a web application. The app will calculate each meal’s carbon footprint and index this “score” against other participants. Scores will be broadcasted at Emerge 2020 for public scrutiny and collective shaming and musing.

“Manna From Psyche,” an augmented-reality public art installation by William T. Ayton, depicts the asteroid Psyche, rotating above and showering spectators with the metaphorical fruits of investigating the cosmos. The art is viewable via free iOS and Android apps, as well as printed media and on-site screens. “Manna from Psyche” presents space exploration as food for thought and human nourishment, incorporating Arizona landscape tones, textured with Ayton’s original paintings interpreting local petroglyphs, especially spirals alluding to Fibonacci’s sequence. Connecting technological and natural environments, “Manna From Psyche” offers insight on science, art, and sustenance for human advancement and survival.

Bingo! Food is cooperation is a social practice artwork that explores the cooperative behavior found in kombucha, and an interactive game that encourages us to think about food and food sharing as integral parts of everyday life. Kombucha is just one of many foods containing a multitude of cooperative species; other examples include yogurt, cheese, sourdough bread, and kefir. We see kombucha as a complex system that is heavily reliant on multiple species interacting with each other, which parallels our own experience with food. COOPERATION+FOOD+BINGO! players will interact with strangers, friends, and family and have lively discussions about food, cooperation, and other human behavior.

The Arizona Cancer Evolution Center examines the iconic hot dog and considers all of the things that it means to people. After all, food is not just food; it represents myriad ideas that can be unpacked and investigated. Class, memory, health, disease, ritual, and family can all be explored through the hot dog. Is the hot dog an emblem of Fourth of July picnics? Cancer? Food insecurity? Baseball? This installation invites you to add your own thoughts and ideas. We want to know: what does a hot dog mean to you?