Digital Culture Festival (map + parking)
Throughout the three-day run of Emerge, the Digital Culture Festival celebrates the collaboration of artists, engineers and scientists as distinguished guest artists and faculty and students from ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the Fulton Schools of Engineering exhibit a series of interactive happenings. These creations will fill indoor and outdoor spaces spanning the arc of design and arts buildings at the west end of the Tempe campus. The Festival will culminate in a Saturday evening gala that will also include the closing show of the ASU’s Night of the Open Door. All festival exhibits and events are open to the public.
The festival activities include:
- Immerge (Nelson Fine Arts building and plaza, begins at 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 3) The setting will become the canvas for a unique interactive performance that immerses the audience in the futures imagined throughout the conference. Improvising actors (call them "animators") will move through the crowd enticing them to drive interactive sculptures and animations. The audience – based on their interactions with the actors and machines and their patterns of movement – will drive real-time graphics and sound engines. These engines will produce three-dimensional visual displays on the building and create surround-sound displays in the plaza. This cutting-edge show is being developed by a diverse group of ASU faculty and students from the arts, design and engineering units led by faculty members Daragh Byrne, Lance Gharavi, Hilary Harp, Todd Ingalls, Jordan Meyers, Loren Olson, Garth Paine, Jacob Pinholster, David Tinapple and Pavan Turaga. Read more
- Digital Culture Corridor (open all three days, March 1–3, unless otherwise noted):
- Sensory Meadow: located in the Digital Culture Walkway of the Stauffer Building on the Arizona State University Main Campus in Tempe, Arizona, features a lighted sculptural passageway that responds in real time to environmental sensors visualizing a range of metro factors such as air quality, water usage, and traffic levels. The artwork is a suspended garden of 45 light-weight translucent forms made of multiple layers of laser-cut Plexiglas. These computer-generated blossoms pulse in response to local real-time data such as river water flows, barometric pressure, CO2 levels and air particulate readings. In addition, the environment reacts dramatically to people passing under it through responsive sound and quickening light pulses. Created by Mary Neubauer and Todd Ingalls. (Stauffer Breezeway)
- “Your ______Here” is an SMS “happening.” Text-based projections will be displayed on the exterior of the Nelson Fine Arts Building, prompting passersby to contribute responses via mobile phone. Throughout theEmerge event, the system will collect and display provocative participant messages related to the festival themes. Created by Aisling Kelliher, Silvan Linn and Ryan Spicer. (Nelson Fine Arts Building exterior)
- Building Projections: Jake Pinholster, director of the Herberger Institute School of Theatre and Film, and his students will illuminate the Nelson Fine Arts Plaza and portions of the desert sky.
- 2012: A Golf Odyssey: A multidisciplinary team of students from across The Design School and Digital Culture are collaborating to turn the Neeb Plaza into a miniature golf course. The typical mini–golf experience is augmented by holes that react to a player’s progress, successes and failures. The four holes communicate with the golfers and with each other to create a fun, responsive and collective update to the mini–golf tradition.
- Powered by Fiction: Artists, Makers, Tinkerers and the Backstories that Inspire Them to Create, presented by Intel: A past that never was; a future that may never be; a present day made strange…. The imagined worlds of speculative fiction give us a lens through which to interrogate our own world, to explore paths we did not take and to begin to chart a new course toward tomorrow. This gallery exhibit, sponsored by Intel Labs, showcases fictional worlds made tangible and real through the creation of not just stories but also costumes, props, gadgets and environments. Explore the power of design fiction to generate the artifacts of alternate worlds. (The Design Gallery)
- Alien Health Embodied Game and I Know Where We Stand Game:SMALLab invites you to play in an immersive health game for middle-schoolers called “Feed yer Alien.” Students level up as they learn about nutrition while feeding a foundling alien who has a body like ours. This active, mixed-reality game will also be demoed with the new game that was created during the EMERGE Workshop called the “I Know Where We Stand Game.” (Open on Saturday, March 3 from 5–7 p.m. Digital Arts Ranch at University Drive and Myrtle Avenue.)
- Echo:System: “echo: system” is a live performance and installation work led by Arts, Media + Engineering Professor Grisha Coleman with Todd Ingalls and a collaborative team of ASU artists and researchers. The project is a response to our current environmental crisis caused by contemporary humans’ inability to reflect on the impact of their actions on the natural world. The goals of the project are to create lasting, arts-driven vehicles for cross-disciplinary research, curriculum advancement and community engagement. (Open Saturday, March 3 from noon – 1 p.m. and 4:30–7 p.m. Neeb Plaza)
- Starting With the Universe: Design Science Now: Experience an immersive theater experience inside David McConville’s GeoDome and explore cosmic models to design problems in an era of unprecedented global change induced by human activities. (Open Saturday, March 3 from 5–7 p.m. ASU Art Museum)
- Interactive Performances (Film Studio, Stauffer B125, Saturday, March 3,
5–6:15 p.m.):
- Digital Culture Music Ensemble (5–5:30 p.m.): The DC Music Ensemble, directed by Visiting Professor Garth Paine, transcends the acoustic/digital divide. Members control software interfaces in an organic and dynamic fashion that rivals the rich musicality and nuance that heritage acoustic instruments provide. The ensemble seeks to address the question “What is the music of our time?” by combining the old with the new.
- Laptop Orchestra (5:45-6:15 p.m.): Laptop Orchestra of Arizona State (LOrkAS) is a student–initiated, student–led and student–managed group from various backgrounds and disciplines. Performers explore the possibilities of the laptop for musical, visual and interactive expression and push the envelope of integrating arts and technology.
