Industrial robots dancing with aerialists and clowns, flying drones singing with experimental musicians, carnival games from the future, 3-D printing, breathtaking visual projections: Arizona State University’s Emerge is an annual event that unites scientists and engineers with artists, humanists and futurists to create ambitious, inspiring and tangible experiences of the future.

This year, Emerge will be a Carnival of the Future—a radically creative, playful and challenging encounter with a future that we actually want to make real. Emerge 2014 will feature immersive, interactive adventures under a giant circus tent erected in the heart of Downtown Phoenix’s vibrant arts district, integrated with Artlink’s Art Detour, the largest self-guided public art walk in the United States. The theme for Emerge 2014 is “The Future of Me,” exploring the duality between the ever-expanding, technologically-aided power of the individual and the dominance of vast systems of surveillance and control that threaten to reduce us to nothing more than tiny motes in dense global networks. Are we on the verge of the triumph of the individual? Will the future be dominated by systems where self-determination is only a memory? Or, inevitably, is something more complicated afoot? Join Emerge on March 7, 2014, to find out.

Learn more and RSVP at http://emerge.asu.edu.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.