Luna City: 2175
director of Youth Experiences
If humans were to live off Earth, where would we go? How could we build a sustainable community? What would day to day live be like? These are questions that cannot be answered through one expertise alone – so CSI, along with the Herberger Institute, SFIS, and the Fulton School of Engineering, built a collaborative pool of geologists, planetary scientists, engineers, artists, architects, and future thinkers to answer these questions.
As the audience stepped up to the door of the Emerge Festival, they received a visitor badge: Welcome to Luna City. As the stepped through the airlock into the lobby, they were greeted by a bustling spaceport. The latest VR technology, a real-time Earth Simulator (for those who got homesick while on the moon), and the local population of artists, miners, researchers, and a few unsavory black-market dealers who may sell you some rare goods.
If audience members wanted to truly experience life on the moon, they lined up for a hyperloop ride to Neighborhood 83 – a fully built and immersive slice-of-life on the moon. In Neighborhood 83, they could meet Aisha, the dancer poet who would lead them in a meditation in the Earth-view room. Or Thorium, the singer scientist who fled Earth to conduct his illegal genetic experiments. Or Jay, the gardener who wistfully speaks of his lover who is stuck back on Earth.
During the tour, the audience was also invited to participate in one of several local rituals. In one ritual, a recently deceased member of the Lunar community was celebrated, and her remains were lovingly given back into the carbon-cycle of the system. In another, members of the Neighborhood sat in a circle and openly talked about the conflicts they had with one another – seeking reparations and community openly. Each tour was an exchange – the audience could ask questions and learn more about the Luna City, while they offered their presence and attention during community moments.
“March 2018 marked the seventh annual Emerge event, an annual festival of futures designed to create immersive, exciting, and thought-provoking experiences of the future. This year marked a new high-water mark for Emerge in terms of production quality, narrative development, and cross-university collaboration. We welcomed visitors to Luna City, a city on the Moon in the year 2175.
Emerge transformed the state-of-the-art Galvin Playhouse on ASU’s Tempe campus into a rich, immersive experience grounded in space-science research and the inspirational vision of our Writer at Large, Kim Stanley Robinson. 180 faculty, students, staff, and external collaborators worked for 9 months to create a visceral experience of Luna City in the Galvin space. Visitors could speak with one of the 20 performers playing their roles as the citizens of Luna City, and explore living spaces, an artist’s studio, a science lab, and other fully realized spaces in a lunar neighborhood.
During the course of the weekend that Luna City was open for visitors, hundreds of people went on the neighborhood tour as well as explored a series of installations and performances in the lobby.”
