Aerialists, clowns and industrial robots perform together at ASU's Emerge 2014

What do engineering and theater have in common? They share a focus on performance – the performance of materials, technologies, processes and systems, argues Lance Gharavi, an associate professor in ASU’s School of Film, Dance and Theatre, in a Future Tense article for Slate magazine.

Gharavi collaborated with Jake Pinholster, director of the School of Film, Dance and Theatre, and Srikanth Saripalli, a roboticist in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, to create "You n.0," a performance for ASU’s Emerge: The Carnival of the Future, which took place in Downtown Phoenix on March 7.

"You n.0," in Gharavi’s words, is a “series of performed metaphors that address the past, present and future of human/robot relations.” It features Baxter, a cutting-edge industrial robot created by Rethink Robotics, interacting with a cast of aerialists and clowns, and a behind-the-scenes team of technical wizards.

To design the performance, the team started with the question “What can this robot do?" According to Gharavi, “This is almost never an easy question to answer for new technologies, in part because, though capabilities are not unlimited, neither are they certain. One doesn’t so much discover capabilities as produce them. Or rather, one does both. This often involves transforming the technology itself, as well as the processes and means by which you engage the technology. And this is significantly what research in engineering means. It is largely the same in performance.”

To learn more about "You n.0," including how to control a robot with an iPad and the surprising difficulty of teaching Baxter to pop and lock, read the full article at Future Tense. To learn more about Emerge, visit 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.