Margaret Atwood on the Imagination

In November 2014, award-winning author Margaret Atwood visited Arizona State University as part of the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative. In this interview, she discusses topics ranging from climate change and storytelling to the nature of hope and how she conducts scientific research for her books.

In March 2015, Arizona State University’s Emerge presented eleven spellbinding “visitations from the future” – tangible, visceral experiences at the intersection of art and science. Learn more at emerge.asu.edu.

In November 2014, award-winning author Margaret Atwood visited Arizona State University as part of the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative. In this interview, she discusses topics ranging from climate change and storytelling to the nature of hope and how she conducts scientific research for her books.

Our stuff is meaningful; it’s symbolically and semiotically imbued with signals of memory, utility, and identity.  These meanings are the fabric of culture – shared ideas and values that we

The wiry old man stood in the Martian cave, sipping his coffee. Yuri’s rock-embedded display stretched across the cavern. The print from his mug reflected off the panel’s glass, “NASA MVC: Class of 2049.” He moved closer to it and touched the incoming spaceship’s blinking icon.

An experimental philosopher’s project to document 100 or even 1,000 years of change with a single photograph.
Joey Eschrich
Slate – Future Tense

A new project by experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats at Arizona State University involves creating simple, incredibly durable pinhole cameras that will slowly create a single image over the course of a century or a millennium.

Boasting two interstate freeways and one of Arizona’s largest shopping malls, the city of Tempe has been selected to represent the evolution of world civilization over the next thousand years.

A new cooperative venture at Arizona State University aims to make the university a key academic hub for the emerging discipline of biomimicry. Since Janine Benyus first observed and named the

Radically new visions of the future will be showcased as part of Arizona State University’s Emerge 2015 – a one-day event featuring visionary Jad Abumrad, host of the award-winning show Radiolab, and 10 spellbinding “visitations from the future,” including theatrical performances, improvisation, games, dance and hands-on opportunities to design and build the future.

Climate fiction, or “cli fi,” can be a dreary genre. Storytellers like to make a grim business of climate change, populating their narratives with a humorless onslaught of death, destruction, drowned monuments, and starving children. Margaret Atwood is the conspicuous exception, somehow managing to tackle the subject, including these familiar elements, with deadpan wit and an irreverent playfulness, making it both more interesting and believable. The flood is coming, her MaddAddam trilogy promises, but there is hope.

Want to change the future? Start with a great story. EVOKE is a massive multi-player online educational game that uses narrative to help players develop 21st century skills and drive collaborative innovation. EVOKE “agents” engage online and in the real world in social networks to complete missions that will change their community, their country and their future. EVOKE is a collaboration between the World Bank and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination.

We are sentimental creatures. And by this I mean to say that we have the capacity to balance our emotions with our mental facility. From Wiktionary, we learn this about the word sentimental and its origins: “A vogue word mid-18c. with wide application, commonly a thought colored by or proceeding from emotion” (1762). The word sentimental suggests a balance: the human balance.

EVOKE: The Collaborative Process from Science & the Imagination on Vimeo.

Want to change the future? Start with a great story. EVOKE is a massive multi-player online educational game that uses narrative to help players develop 21st century skills and drive collaborative innovation.

An interview with John Metz, an expert on harpsichord, piano, and Early Music, and an emeritus professor of music at Arizona State University. John is the composer of Anthony’s Cosmic Adventures, a choral piece based on The Space Child’s Mother Goose, a collection of whimsical space poems written in the 1950s by Frederick Winsor.

A panel of researchers from Arizona State University’s Frankenstein Bicentennial Project will deliver public lectures as part of “It’s Alive!: Frankenstein on Film,” a weekend of screenings and conversations, Jan. 23-25, at the SIFF Film Center in Seattle.

Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination and Project Humanities will present the latest installment of the Science Fiction TV Dinner series at 6 p.m., Jan. 22, at the Marston Exploration Theater on ASU’s Tempe campus. The event, focused on the television series Dollhouse, will feature one of its stars, Harry Lennix, whose credits include the films Man of Steel, Ray, The Matrix: Reloaded and Revolutions, and NBC’s new hit series The Blacklist.