Emerge 2018: Luna City

In March 2018, Emerge transformed the state-of-the-art Galvin Playhouse on ASU’s Tempe campus into a rich, immersive experience grounded in space-science research and the inspirational vision of our Writer at

The festival’s 2017 theme is Frankenstein, a 200-year old novel that still motivates us to think critically about our creative agency and scientific responsibility. The festival revisits the past in order to reframe our sense of the present and inspire imagination of plausible futures, and asks what we can learn today by looking at emerging science and technology through the lens of art. [embed]https://vimeo.com/209821004[/embed]

A festival of athletic, artistic and scientific visitations from the future featuring theatre, improvisation, interactive experiences, design prototypes, & multimedia performances.

Dancing robots. Google Glass theatre. Wearable electronic utopias. Cameras that record in deep time for 100 years. Fine art created by algorithms. Emerge is a festival of artistic and scientific visitations from the future featuring performance, improvisation, games, dance, hands-on opportunities to design and build the future, and a multimedia performance by Radiolab co-creator Jad Abumrad!

Emerge 2014 challenges engineers, artists, scientists, designers, story tellers, ethicists, humanists, makers and futurists to explore questions of individuality, autonomy and freedom, as well as control, automation and facelessness.

We understand the world through stories. Our stories may be rooted in rigorous fact or unbounded imagination but, being incomplete, they are always lies. Many are useful, however, because humans are pattern-seeking animals. Stories are the way we make sense of a complex world. We build our very selves through the stories that make sense to us – that we chose to believe.

Global leaders from industry and creative practice will join distinguished ASU faculty and talented students for hands-on workshops as well as the Digital Culture Festival which includes exhibits, interactive shows and live presentations.