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EMMEDIA’s 2009-2010 Program focuses on works and practices that engage in social activism, question the narrative structures commonly used in time-based media, or situate the media arts within larger community collaborations and interaction.

This Programming season is contextualized within a thematic framework, the concept of CRASH!, with its varied associations and meanings. Interestingly, the theme was decided before the endless barrage of news about the frightful state of economic affairs locally and globally… Things were going fine just a while ago. Stop! Interrupted advance, momentum, and expectations: suspended animation. Depression. Collapse. Amidst the economic, emotional, systemic, environmental, even organizational breakdown, we are even more determined to examine this state, this threat. Crisis is opportunity.

The CRASH! theme is particularly poignant for a media arts centre based in Calgary—a city well known for its boom and bust cycles. Aside from the economic implications, the word describes a curse in media arts practice, where technologies frequently crash. Artists, working most often in isolation, are also vulnerable to existential angst and emotional malaise. Calgary’s arts community is regularly threatened when mid-career artists/administrators flee to larger centres en mass, or when modest funding support is frozen or cut back. Calgary’s out of control growth has been painful: with inflated living costs, gridlock, stress; civility hitting new lows; the clash of ideologies, inequities; and more recently, bankrupted businesses and worksites. The raucous sounds of frenetic construction and expansion come crashing to a halt—sudden silence.

Yet artists improvise, adapt, and intervene. They crash assumptions and expectations, and find new contexts and meaning.