What kinds of futures can we imagine? How do we create the futures we want? These are the questions that animate Emerge: A Festival of Futures, returning to Arizona State University’s Tempe Campus on February 25, 2017.

Now in it’s fifth year, Emerge offers an imaginative glimpse into the future. With a look at the latest inventions from ASU and beyond, along with playful speculation of the world shaped by these coming technologies, visitors will enjoy a panoply of artwork, immersive experiences, interactive narratives, and engaging performances for all ages.

Since 2013, Emerge has explored concepts as varied as the future of sport, the shifting definitions of community, and the nature of truth. This year, inspired by the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the festival will focus on the themes of innovation, ambition, and creative responsibility for the technologies we’re building now — and the implication of what may be yet to come.

“Nearly two centuries after its publication, Frankenstein remains a useful narrative for exploring the relationships between science, technology, the arts, and society,” said Dave Guston, director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. “Similarly, Emerge is a unique space for world-class artists, researchers, and the public to play together and learn how each of us has a role in building our lives for the 21st Century.”

Emerge will occupy ASU’s historic University Club, and will feature several creative experiments and installations, including:

Radio Healer, a Phoenix based artist collective performing an indigenous re-imagined ceremony comprising moving images, handmade tools, regalia, performance, and sound

Democracy-as-a-Service, a live, participatory experiment in computer science and biotechnology to combat political gridlock, bureaucratic corruption, and unreliable officials

Edibleskin, a gallery of technologies from an imagined future where fashion becomes merely an extension of the body

Neurocomic, a cartoon adventurer exploring the brain and cutting edge neuroscience

Tomorrow’s Monster™, an investigation into intellectual property regulations related to biomedical research and technology

Emerge: A Festival of Futures is sponsored by ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and the Center for Science and the Imagination. The event is a part of ASU’s Night of The Open Door and is free to attend. To learn more, visit emerge.asu.edu.

About School for the Future of Innovation in Society
At ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, we are planning now for the kinds of futures that we will want to inhabit. Focusing on humanity’s plausible futures, we make innovation the object of systematic study and informed critique, so that we might get what we truly want and need out of our scientific and technological endeavors. With our interdisciplinary faculty, students study the promises and challenges of new technologies and the big ideas that change our lives each day. We believe that the future is for everybody, and that we all have innovative roles to play in weaving science and technology into the social fabric. More information can be found at sfis.asu.edu.