Emerge 2018

March 2018 marked the seventh annual Emerge event, an annual festival of futures designed to create immersive, exciting, and thought-provoking experiences of the future. This year marked a new high-water mark for Emerge in terms of production quality, narrative development, and cross-university collaboration. We welcomed visitors to Luna City, a city on the Moon in the year 2175. 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 Large, Kim Stanley Robinson. 180 faculty, students, staff, and external collaborators worked for 9 months to create a visceral experience of Luna City in the Galvin space. Visitors could speak with one of the 20 performers playing their roles as the citizens of Luna City, and explore living spaces, an artist’s studio, a science lab, and other fully realized spaces in a lunar neighborhood.

During the course of the weekend that Luna City was open for visitors, hundreds of people went on the neighborhood tour as well as explored a series of installations and performances in the lobby.