Our man Baxter is supposedly the world’s first industrial robot capable of being taught to dance by two clowns and an aerialist. We shall see if this is true inside our Emerge 2014 carnival tent. For this ensemble effort, we are informed, the aerialist will be doing a mix of trapeze and silk work. Lance Gharavi, ASU’s chair of the MA in Theatre program at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts; and Srikanth Saripalli, the robot herder of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, are behind all this. Do you have any idea how hard it is to erect an aerial rig under a carnival tent in a fashion such that our singing drones – theirs is a separate performance, see “When the Robots Give Voice to Our Songs” – don’t crash into it?

Read Lance Gharavi’s article on Slate



Image courtesy of Steve Jurvetson, used under a Creative Commons license. Thanks Steve!