There’s a little bit of everything in Emmedia’s Birth of a Notion

DETAILS

Birth of a Notion presented by EMMedia
Plaza Theatre
Thursday, September 10 - Thursday, September 10

More in: Film

No, Emmedia isn’t remaking the racially insensitive and politically challenged cinematic masterpiece Birth of a Nation. We won’t see media artists clad in white pointy cloaks walking the streets of Kensington (I hope). Instead, Emmedia is taking over the Plaza to showcase the work from its latest production access program.

The title, a take on Birth of a Nation, actually represents the coming of age of the program and the media arts centre. “It’s a play on the idea that there was this notion of what Emmedia was created to be at one point. And that now, with the success of our production access program last year and then this year especially, where we’re moving away from the screening room to the Plaza, it’s kind of like encompassing everything some of the founders envisioned this program to be from the beginning,” says Eric Becker, production co-ordinator for Emmedia.

Starting in 1984, the program gives participants the opportunity to use equipment and space and to attend workshops while working on a media project. This year, a record number of applicants fought for 10 positions, ranging from scholarship (those who have never worked in media arts) to bars and tones (intermediates) to artist-in-residence (hot shots).

“Each program has an allocated amount of workshops that they can take, equipment usage, tape stock usage,” says Becker. “It ends up that they never exceed their limit, that they can basically just come, go and pick up equipment and use it as they may.”

Birth of a Notion will feature the work of nine artists ranging from animation, narrative film, generative audio and documentation of an installation.

Greg Debicki’s “Interacting with Nature Through Generative Audio” certainly ranks among the more complex offerings. He sounds more like a mathematics professor or a physicist than an artist. “You’ll see onscreen a lot of little boxes that do different things and then they’re connected with these little strings,” he says. “It’s almost like hardwiring stuff. It almost looks like a circuit but a little messy.”

“You’ll see that and then what I’ve done for one of the pieces that I’m showing is I’ve built this visual patch that generates fractals based on whatever numbers you put in.”

OK. Um. What Debicki does is take sensory inputs from nature — audio and visual — and pump those inputs through a program to create music. The corresponding visuals will be familiar to most, but a little different. “It’s almost like a visualizer, but in reverse, where the visuals are making the music instead of the music making the visuals,” says Debicki.

His music, though generated from programs, still has a discernible musical quality. He harvests the best little bits of the created sounds. “I’ve done a little bit of post-production on those little bits to make them kind of flow better and let them build up a little more and have kind of a more accessible flow to them,” he says.

For those who prefer a more straightforward approach to their films, Donna Brunsdale presents a more narrative take with “Playground Dangers.” A newcomer to media arts but no stranger to film, her work examines the dangers to parents of, well, the playground and of being a parent in general.

“It came from my experiences as a parent and how often I got hurt on the playground. Forget about my kid getting hurt, I was always getting hurt,” says Brunsdale.

“Also, to the idea of a parent, the sort of ambiguous power relations between the child and the parent. Obviously the parent is supposed to be the powerful in charge one, but you’re so willing to put yourself out for the child and you care so much about the child.”

Nursing her own bruises but also relishing in the delights of rearing a young one, Brunsdale says there is humour in the piece, filmed on location at a foreboding play place, to get the point across.

In addition to Brunsdale and Debicki, the hour-long screening will feature work from Tania Cruz, Danielle Gotell, Lydia Karpenko, Tamara Meparishvili, Anne Koizumi, Micheal Welchman and Aran Wilkinson-Blanc.