Emerge 2015: The Future of Choices and Values

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!

The Oracle of South Scottsdale already knows our future. As with any good Oracle, you get to ask one – and only one – question. So make it the most important question you can possibly imagine.

Sustainability researchers and community members explore how we can work together to build happier neighborhoods through sustainability interventions.

Build a pinhole camera with a 100-year exposure time to hide somewhere in the Phoenix area, invisibly monitoring changes in the urban landscape between now and 2115.

Created by Camilla Jensen and Tamara Christensen Create your own fairy tale from the future in an epic Lego build led by experts in the art and science of Lego

An interactive exploration of RFID and data visualization technology explores a future where the smallest elements of our behavior can be digitally tracked, stored and shared with people around you.

Imagine a dystopian future wherein the Internet has fallen under control of the federal government and has been saddled with restrictions, oversight, and fear. Countering this infringement on freedom is

A roaming atmospheric performance exploring utopian experiments, dreams, and the concept of the ideal city, created by Rachel Bowditch of ASU’s School of Film, Dance, and Theatre.

A coin-operated robotic art-dispensing machine that scans the Internet for inspiration and creates customized paintings on 4” x 6” blocks of wood.

Create your own prototypes of artifacts from the future. From parking tickets to coffins, the Future Design Studio asks you to imagine what everyday objects look like in the future, and then invites you to watch as improv performers from The Torch Theatre create the world in which your objects exist.

What if we could teach robots to dance? How would it change the relationship between humans and machines? ASU roboticists and performance artists are taking on that challenge using the Baxter industrial robot.

Suppose the Cloud started requiring – or demanding! – the use of human bodies? Bodies for a Global Brain is a set of performances imagining just that. Funded originally by

Gut Churn begins with a simple question:  what does it mean to “innovate?” How does it feel to make something new in the world? (These are questions Jad Abumrad was

On November 20, the core Emerge team took a break from our work on Emerge 2015 to begin planning for Emerge 2016. We wanted to try something a little bit