Engineers, dancers, scientists, actors, futurists and poets combined creative forces over three days to present “Emerge 2013: The Future of Truth” at ASU.
The three-day event, from Feb. 28 to March 2, brought together students and faculty, as well as experts from all over the Valley, to rethink the future of the human race and the environments we share.
“We firmly believe that you can’t have better futures without better dreams, and you can’t have better dreams unless you have a common grounding what constitutes reality, and that’s increasingly being fragmented in our society,” Joel Garreau, ASU professor and Emerge co-director, said.
The series started with private workshops on Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, there was a public festival that lasted into the night featuring performances, exhibits and interactive demonstrations.
While most of the day was devoted to showing the results from the workshops, the event culminated Saturday night with a gala and celebration featuring a variety of performances.
Emerge was far from a traditional event. It featured a unique combination of art and technology.
“When the going gets weird, the weird go pro,” Garreau said.
The show opened with “Twitter Verses” which featured spoken-word poetry, music and modern dance. The performance brought together students from the School of Theatre and Film and the School of Dance to create a visual parable about the state of narrative and truth in the digital age.
The show also included performances by guitarist James O’Halloran and Tohono O'odham, and bands D Faktion Nyne and Mumsigo Tribe.
During the entire evening students in ASU professor David Tinnaple’s “Media Installations 494/598” class displayed their experimental media installation that involved geometrically mapping video projections onto structural objects and forms.
“We’ve curated this so that we get dancers right next to Nobel Prize winners and neuroscientists right next to talented students,” Garreau said.
Emerge is part of ASU’s Night of the Open Door, the largest signature event of the AZ SciTech Festival, which offers a glimpse at all of the creative elements that go into making ASU a world-class university.
“I don’t think we could have done this anywhere other than ASU, I really think this is part of the ASU DNA,” Garreau said. “ASU is arguably the foremost silo-busting institution in the United States and that’s what emerge is all about, too. Breaking down the barriers between different kinds of truth.”
The theme of Emerge 2013 was the future of truth and the idea that no one person or profession has a lock on truth, but by bringing everyone together, it would create something that is larger than the sum of its parts.
