“We’re the gallery that shows everything else that nobody wants to show,” EMMEDIA programming director Vicki Chau says with a laugh. No, EMMEDIA is not an artistic bottom feeder. The art gallery and video production house fosters electronic art, displaying new works of art and providing its members (ranging from established experimental artists and film industry techs to video production hobbyists) with the equipment and facilities to produce their work.
Just about anything that runs on electricity qualifies as electronic art: experimental video and audio recordings, Internet art, music and robotics. Vicki cites many favourite examples of the electronic art she has displayed while curating EMMEDIA’s gallery-and-screening room located next to its 11th Avenue Southwest office. These include Colombian electronic musician Icaro Zorbar’s assemblages of music boxes, tape recorders and industrial fans, which were either perceived as avant-garde, musical broadcast equipment or machinery possessed.
German Philipp Artus brought elaborate laser animations of snails. Ottawa resident Donna Legault’s installation digitally converted sounds made by gallery observers into kinetic energy via chains that hung from the ceiling and drew patterns in sand on the floor. Suffice to say, this is the sort of experimental art that one expects to see at the MOMA in New York, but the dedicated members and volunteers of EMMEDIA have made a space for it in Calgary.
