The Transmission Hub

Host: Adora Nwofor 

Starring: Janira Moncayo, Mackenzie Bedford, Teresa Tam, Nicole Santangelo, Kenji

Production House: FOREIGNERZ @sansfuccs

Director: Justin Larioza

Producer: Ronda Kadri

First Camera: Jashan Makan

Second Camera: Jevan Bailey

Editor: Benjamin San Martin 

Assistant Editor: Eman Safadi

Colourist:  Benjamin San Martin 

Sound Design: Benjamin San Martin

Location Sound Mixer: Jevan Bailey, Jashan Makan

Title Sequence: Cole Edwards 

Music

Spectre in the Leaves – DonVayei

Can’t Fake It – Larry Poppinz

A Good Time (Instrumental Version) – waykap

Browser Update – Midnight Cycler

The Cocktail Lounge – Sum Wave

Guided Towards REM – Autonomic Sensations

On Call – Jones Meadow

Dancing Through the Ages – Rymdklang Soundtracks

Tyla – Water vogue edit KLICKAUD

Exits – Felix Johansson Carne

LCL Series 8 Episode 2 – The Transmission Hub

Janira Moncayo: We pretty much support all the stages of creation of media art. EMMEDIA is pretty much an artist-run centre, so that means that the people that work here are all professional artists, and we’re also a non-profit since 1983. We support education, the production and presentation, so people can come here, learn a completely new skill, then, you know, use our space and our gear to produce a specific type of work, and then show the work at either, you know, an exhibition, a screening, or a performance, or even our Particle + Wave Media Arts Festival, which we do every year since 2012.

Adora Nwofor: At EMMEDIA Gallery, it’s more than media. It’s a community production.

Janira: Hi, I mean, I’m the programming director here, so I connect and serve the community to a bunch of different public programs. You know, that could be either an exhibition or complementary events like an artist talk, a workshop, or even just really fun events that bring the people together here. Overall, we just try to strike a balance between showcasing local talent and then exposing the local artists here to what’s going on a national or international level.

Adora: What is this area over here?

Janira: Yeah, so this is pretty much our entrance/lounge area. So we can have exhibitions here or more of a gathering space so people can sit here in those really cool chairs. And we tend to have a lot of meetings or just hanging out, like when an opening is going on, this is where you come and sit down and sit away from the crowd or just eat a lot of food. All the openings have free food like that’s the biggest draw outside of the awesome art. So a big part of what we do at EMMEDIA is offering affordable access to equipment and space just because a lot of the times all that specialized gear is very expensive.

In this cute little tiny room we’ll have like a variety of equipment ranging from lights, tripods, the cable wall with your 500 cables, cameras, projectors, computers, iPads…

Adora: How would you rent this?

Janira: Pretty much you just email our technical director, Joe Kelly, at rentals@emmedia.ca and then you tell him, oh, I want to rent this, and that comes after you become a member, which is just a free sign-up online.

One of the main goals is to provide accessibility to media art. We’re always trying to eliminate the financial, the technological and the social barriers to technology. So, you know, whether you find a piece of gear really intimidating or you cannot afford it, we always try to make our workshops free and accessible and all of our gear, I think it’s like half or a third of the industry rate.

We try to strike this balance between community programming as well as the excellence of media art. So at the end of the day, we’re still an art gallery and we’re still trying to push the medium forward to show high quality type of work, but along with that comes a connection with the community. So being aware of what the community wants, what they’re looking for, what they need and what the social context around that is.

Teresa Tam: And unlike other galleries, right, where you just work with an artist or a group of artists to show work, after that, that’s kind of where it ends. Whereas with EMMEDIA, there really is an ongoing relationship. So even if you’re not showing with EMMEDIA, I might be renting something from them.

Janira: So that’s pretty much the equipment room. And then we kind of make our way to our production spaces. Right here, we have our audio and equipment suite. So this is pretty much where people can rent this out to record their own audio whether you want to do like a voiceover or a song or anything pretty much, and you can do this in this booth right here and then you can just edit it or keep track of things in the computer here as well.

Adora: Are there classes, because I’m already just afraid of the computer that’s there. I’m old. I’m afraid of the computer.

Janira: That’s the thing. People think it’s very intimidating and that you need some sort of specialized knowledge, but it’s really not. We’ve, you know, proposed doing workshops like that, but a lot of the times we find when somebody comes and rents it, we just give them a 10-minute tutorial of how to use it, and that’s it. That suffices. So it’s pretty intuitive in a way. Yeah.

Adora: All I heard is ‘anybody can do it.’ I want to ask if I can go in the sound booth.

Janira: Yeah.

Adora: Okay. The only reason I’m asking to go in the sound booth is to make sure that anybody can fit. Oh wait…

Janira: There’s pillows there because last time we found out that people like to take naps here, so it’s a little nap section.

Adora: I mean, if you are, I can’t be in here in my heels. I love it. It did sound different in there.

Janira: It does. It’s really weird.

Adora: Specialized equipment.

Janira: Yeah.

Adora: Incredible. Okay. When you say visual artist, and you’re the person who does animation, like what does that look like?

Mackenzie Bedford: That’s a good question. It looks like a lot of things. I wear a lot of hats. It looks like checking out spaces to see if I can transform them with projections. It looks like seeing if places like EMMEDIA has the equipment that I can use to create those sorts of experiences. And sometimes it even looks like working with other artists to collaborate on something bigger and brighter.

Adora: Show me around this beautiful space that allows you to do beautiful stuff.

Mackenzie: Yeah, all right, let’s go. Okay. So there’s two rooms that we’re going to explore. First off, we have the gallery space. And this, we have a very, very special piece, one that has made me cry several times. This is Nicole Anne Santangelo’s piece, Out of Reach. This is a dedication to her grandfather and her kind of exploring those nuances between light and spirit worlds and grief.

Nicole Santangelo: It’s pretty much a prayer and a ritual for my grandpa because I’ve never been back to the Philippines when he was alive, and I already had the gut feeling that I’ll never see him again. And I feel so bad, especially during his funeral and his cremation, I just had that stinging feeling of guilt because I didn’t do enough to see him again, but like despite that I’ve felt him more now that he’s not in this world.

Ever since he died I’ve been getting more exhibitions, I’ve been getting more, yeah more interviews, more opportunities, so I really feel like he was there like not just guiding me but also like just there for my art so I wanted to say thank you.

Mackenzie: Now we’ve got the screening room with two extra special pieces. So we’ll start over here with Play It Again. This is by Meryl Prendergast. So she is a Boston/London-based artist.

Adora: Now this is called Play It Again. I don’t think we really knew in the ’90s what that was going to mean, because I feel like almost now, if it is not documented via film, it hasn’t even happened.

Mackenzie: It certainly didn’t happen, right?

Adora: I find that the space is very dark. And I mean, I love lighting, but I look good in any lighting. It’s not about me, but how did we get to the decision that it was going to be a lot of black?

Mackenzie: That’s a good question. So the space is usually black. I didn’t paint it like this. I find in media arts and in projection especially, you might think that a white screen is the most optimal surface to project on. You lose a lot of saturation and you lose a lot of contrast because projectors can’t project the colour black. That doesn’t exist, right? And so if you project on something that’s white, you’re losing a lot of the depth of colour that you can accomplish if you go a bit deeper. So actually a lot of screens are, that’s why you hear silver screen, right? It’s not a white screen. The grey kind of will allow for the balance of colours and stuff. So it’s a bit more technical, I think, than maybe some people realize.

Adora: Since EMMEDIA does so many different types of events and showcases so many different types of artists, are there any notable favourites that you have?

Janira: Yeah, I mean, definitely the Particle + Wave exhibition that we have right now, it’s very diverse and very rich. So we have the work Out of Reach by Nicole Santangelo, and it’s a very emotional and very beautiful and refined piece. But, you know, on the completely other side of that, we have Teresa Tam’s, TTES: The ROM Collection.

Teresa Tam: So for the Particle + Wave Festival, I was part of the group exhibition. My piece was called TTES: The ROM Collection. I’m not going to elaborate what the acronyms mean. You can guess what that means. But it’s essentially a hacked Game Boy Advance where it was housed inside a 3D printed shape of my head and then the controller is like my hands, and then the games are outputted onto an e-paper screen so unlike a more traditional LCD or even a CRT screen, I actually chose to use e-paper which is more famously known for being like in e-book readers like Kindles, and so my choice for that is very intentional because it’s so physical. And so you can really see the changes of pixels on the screen, especially because the game I created was 8-bit. I just really wanted to emphasize the physicality of the screen.

Janira: And we’ve also had other projects, such as The Breakdown, where we partnered with Vogue YYC to teach members of the Ballroom community video production. And they created such a variety of extremely good short films.

(Film voiceover): To be a personification of the runway, couture and fashion icons caught between pages, Vogueing, the essence of ballroom, came from this form.

Kenji: EMMEDIA reached out to us, to us meaning the different houses in Calgary. They wanted us to make a short film about how our own respective houses work and how we felt in our houses and how our houses ran. I never really had the background in making short films and stuff like that, so having that resource definitely helped and inspired me and I guess took out a lot of the stress to think about like what to do or like where to start, they basically mapped it out for us from the first workshop being how to you know, create a short film and storyboards and all that stuff all the way to editing and colour correcting, they really had our backs.

(Film voiceover): I remember walking into my first ball. It was bright, loud, energetic, fabulous, and most importantly, it felt like the right place to be.

Janira: We serve a variety of artists at different stages ranging from emerging to established. And you know, there’s like several entry points to EMMEDIA, from having a single work at Particle + Wave to having a solo exhibition or even a traveling exhibition in partnership with a different gallery.

Mackenzie: EMMEDIA’s got a really special spot of having an incredible breadth of technical knowledge in their team and kind of the anything-goes vibe that I think an artist-run centre needs to uplift underground artists.

This particular exhibition I don’t think we could have had in your typical white-walled gallery. Two out of the three of our artists were out of town, and so the EMMEDIA team really had to step up and install this work by themselves with some pretty specific technicalities. And then they did it, and so again, like, not throwing shade to other galleries in the city, but no, this couldn’t have happened in other places.

Adora: I don’t think it’s shady at all. I think that that’s a testament to Calgary being an international city.

Janira, I want EMMEDIA to continue to flourish and I want people to be able to find y’all so that the community grows. How do people like me, myself or anyone else find you?

Janira: Yeah, of course. So EMMEDIA is literally in Sunalta, like a five-minute walk from the Sunalta C-train, a one-minute walk from the 90 bus. So yeah, it’s really, like, transit accessible. We also have a parking lot at the back if you prefer to come in car. But yeah, that’s our physical space. And then if you want to follow us online, we have our website, which is emmedia.ca, as well as our Instagram, which is emmediaYYC, and then our Facebook, which is also EMMEDIA.

Adora: I’m going to add something to that: E-M-Media.

Janira: Yes, E-M-Media. I know, it’s confusing.

Adora: Clarity is kindness.

Janira: Yes, E-M-Media.