'The Future of Me': Using art to cross borders

Life gets intensely personal at national borders, writes Bruce Sterling, science fiction author, design critic and Visionary in Residence at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination.

In a Future Tense article for Slate prompted by the Emerge: The Carnival of the Future festival on Friday, March 7, Sterling muses about borders, open-source hardware, cultural dislocation and his interactive installation piece for Emerge, “My Future Frontier/Mi Futura Frontera.”

“Borders are dynamic and morally contradictory,” says Sterling. “They process the individual, but they're not built for his participation. You can live near a border, and prosper from tourism and arbitrage, but dwelling within the borderline is metaphysically impossible. A border crossing is a cultural clash.”

Borders have the power to legitimize or de-legitimize our identities, and crossing over borders can fundamentally change us by putting us into contact with a different culture, a different soil.

“My Future Frontier/Mi Futura Frontera” was designed at the Torino Fablab in Turin, Italy, and is built using Intel’s new Galileo circuit board. Sterling describes it as “a whirling tower of cultural images, surrounded by a jittery pair of marionettes. These polite border-crossing migrants do their best to obey the gestures of the viewer of the artwork. Like most of us in the passport office and the customs waiting queue, they’re doing the best to go through the motions. But they’re puppets of a system that isn’t built for their benefit, and reactions can get out of hand.”

To learn more about the U.S.-Mexico border, Arduino and the global tech-hacker scene, and Bruce’s next stop after Emerge, read the full article at Future Tense.

On March 7, ASU will present Emerge: The Carnival of the Future, featuring thrilling performances, interactive displays and immersive experiences that cross and obliterate the traditional boundaries between engineering, arts, sciences and humanities beneath a giant circus tent in Downtown Phoenix. Sterling’s article is part of a Future Tense series exploring this year’s theme, “The Future of Me.” Learn more and RSVP at emerge.asu.edu.

Future Tense is a collaboration among ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine that explores how emerging technologies affect policy and society.