Christy Spackman, SFIS - Arizona State University; David Guston, Arizona State University; Ed Finn, Arizona State University; Cynthia Selin, Technical University of Denmark; Jake Pinholster, ASU; Ruth Wylie, Arizona State University; Bob Beard, Bob Beard; Stephen Christensen, ASU; Joey Eschrich, Arizona State University; Nina Miller, ASU; Eliza Robinson, ASU; Rebecca Pringle, ASU; Melissa Waite, ASU; Diana Ayton-Shenker, Leonardo/ISAST; Cindy Ornstein, Mesa Arts Center
virPrague 20: Climate Change, Anthropocene, Geosciences
Emerge 2020 invited artists, scientists, innovators, activists, farmers, and cookers of all skills to join together in producing interactive artworks, exhibits, and performances that playfully explore what it means to Eat — and not just anywhere, but rather at the Edge(s). Our one-day festival brought people of all ages together to traffic in a specific set of ideas and questions: What does it mean to eat, as a human or non-human, in a time of increasing environmental precarity? What alternative forms of food production, distribution, and consumption could flourish at the edges of society, at the edge of what is known, or at the edge between possibility and fantasy? What new forms of eating, or edge-blurring, are necessary to create a culinary world where deliciousness is not the purview of the well-to-do, but accessible to everyone? We accepted submissions that responded to the design aspirations of the New American University by leveraging place, fusing intellectual disciplines, and being socially embedded. Emerge 2020: Eating at the Edges pushed the boundaries of the festival by requiring a new form of making and doing of the planning team, one that closely brought regulatory structures into conversation with experiential engagement. By focusing on using all the senses in understanding and thinking about food, Emerge 2020 brought people of all ages into thinking about the systems of production, distribution, consumption, and value that shape whose forms of eating get to matter.