Emerging Together: Celebrating Community, Art, Music & Creative Technology

Emerging Together marks the culmination of Mandisa Smith’s Cocooned Together, created in partnership with Mirrored Glass as part of Pulse of the City.

Over the course of a series of community wet-felting workshops, artists, neighbors, and participants have come together to build the Cocoon by hand—transforming individual pieces of felt, shared experiences, and biometric data into one collective work of art.

On September 13, the completed Cocoon will come fully to life.

Visitors will be invited to enter, gather around, and interact with the sculpture as embedded technology developed through Pulse of the City allows the work to respond to their presence and engagement in real time. The result brings ancient traditions of wet felting and textile-making into conversation with the body, contemporary technology, sound, and data.

2:00 PM — Community Gathering & Cocoon Experience

Guests are invited to gather, explore, and interact with the completed Cocooned Together installation.

3:00 PM — Poetry, Community Reflections & Live Music

Poetry and reflections from participants will lead into a live performance by acclaimed Detroit bassist and composer Marion Hayden, featuring four original compositions inspired by biometric data gathered throughout the community workshops.

The performance transforms traces of participants’ experiences into music, while the responsive Cocoon offers another way of seeing and feeling how individual contributions can become part of something larger.

Most importantly, Emerging Together belongs to the people who helped bring the Cocoon into being. Artists, community members, friends, and neighbors will be invited to reflect on what the experience has meant to them, reconnect with one another, and celebrate what has been created together.

The afternoon brings the many layers of Cocooned Together into one shared experience: the hands that made it, the bodies that shaped it, the stories carried within it, and the music and technology that allow it to continue responding and evolving.

And then, we celebrate.

There will be music. There will be movement. There will be connection.

Everyone will dance!

 UN SUSTAINABILITY GOALS

We use Detroit's UNESCO City of Design designation as a call to action for Detroiters to embrace the Sustainable Development Goals in their own communities, contributing to the active effort of solving global interconnected issues.