FEED Media Art Center — 2025 Year in Review
By Edward Patrick Kranz, PH’KAKI Creative Works
A public record of programs, a deeper read on impact, and a clear signal toward what comes next in Historic Downtown Erie, Pennsylvania.
FEED Media Art Center 2025 In Review and 2026 On the Horizon!
In 2025, FEED moved beyond being “a place that hosts media art” and operated as a piece of cultural infrastructure: a gallery, a production lab, and a civic room that people could count on. The year’s programs did more than entertain. They trained attention, built creative confidence, and helped Erie’s downtown behave like a living arts district—nights with purpose, repeat visits, and community ownership.
This review documents key exhibitions, residencies, events, and institutional milestones from 2025, and then steps back to ask the more important question: what did these programs do for Erie—culturally, socially, and economically—and why does a media arts center matter here, specifically?
2025 at a glance
Long-run exhibition model (seasonal shows with consistent public hours) that supported repeat attendance and stronger downtown “habit” formation.
A residency pipeline that treated experimentation as a public good (OPENFEED + Sandbox), including hybrid/remote models.
Signature “all-systems-live” events that proved capacity and community appetite (FEEDback and other large-format nights).
Programming that fused local subject matter with global media-art methods (Lake Erie listening work, participatory digital-disconnection installations).
Institutional validation and forward momentum via major capital support for the building and district.
Program record: exhibitions, residencies, events, milestones
Winter–Spring: exhibitions with duration
FEED’s early-year programming established a clear operational claim: media art can live in public hours, with repeat viewing, without being reduced to a one-night novelty. By holding exhibitions open across weeks and months, FEED turned “an opening” into a habit—inviting Erie residents back, letting the work deepen, and teaching the downtown corridor to behave like a real arts district with rhythm, not sporadic spikes.
Two long-run anchors carried that point. Brad Ford’s Broken Sculpture ran from Valentine’s Day through Memorial Day, a sustained window that tested whether the room could hold attention over time and whether audiences would return. Stephan Moore and Jenny Boles’ Palace of Machinery premiered March 26 and ran through late May, reframing archival Westinghouse factory film and industrial history as immersive contemporary experience—less nostalgia, more circuitry: what industry built, what it cost, and what it still does to the body when it becomes sound and light.
Spring: the building as medium
Alongside indoor exhibitions, FEED treated the building’s street presence as part of the work. That choice matters in Erie. A media arts center only becomes “for the city” when the city can encounter it without needing permission, jargon, or an art-world key. Projection, storefront visibility, and public-facing installations made media art legible at the sidewalk level—an invitation that says: this belongs here, and you can walk in.
Projects like Lights on State used façade-scale projection interventions to push media art into the public realm and strengthen the night-time identity of the downtown corridor. The FEED Mirror—an interactive portraiture and public-facing installation—reinforced FEED’s interest in participation and live systems rather than purely static display. In practice, these works functioned as cultural wayfinding: they helped downtown feel “active,” even to someone who never crossed the threshold.
Early summer: FEEDback as a capacity proof
FEEDback’s 12-hour music and media marathon (June 7–8) was not just a festival-style event; it was a competency test. Running multiple stages, concurrent programming, and a wide roster demonstrated that FEED can produce complex, multi-disciplinary experiences at community scale—exactly the kind of operational credibility that turns curiosity into trust. For Erie, that matters because it shifts expectations: a downtown arts night can be ambitious, technically demanding, and still welcoming.
Summer–Fall: OPENFEED and Sandbox (residency as pipeline)
FEED’s residency work in 2025 made a stronger argument than any press release could: experimentation is not a luxury. It is a civic resource. OPENFEED expanded FEED’s network and brought artists into Erie with enough time and support to produce real outcomes, while Sandbox reinforced the value of process-first research and development—work that may be unfinished, but is structurally necessary if a city wants an experimental arts ecosystem that doesn’t burn out or repeat itself.
OPENFEED 2025’s cohort and summer residencies—including hybrid and virtual components—were developed in partnership with Erie Art Company, positioning residency not as a prestige badge but as a practical pipeline: artists arrive, build, test, share, and leave documentation behind that strengthens the next cycle. Jessica Reisch and collaborators’ Lake Erie Listening Project (July residency window) is a clean example of what “local subject, global-grade method” looks like: listening used as ecological attention, the lake treated as a living instrument rather than a backdrop. The July 20 animation screenings and artist talk extended that pipeline into media literacy—pairing exhibition with conversation so audiences can learn how to watch, how to ask better questions, and how to track craft across disciplines.
Susan Snipes’ Waiting for Your Response (opened August 14; ran through November) continued that thread, but with a different kind of participation: an immersive installation exploring digital disconnection that invited public submissions and treated audience contribution as part of the work’s living archive. Later in the year, fall Sandbox programming—including public-facing moments aligned with Gallery Night—reinforced a key FEED value: make process visible, not just outcomes. In a city trying to retain creative people, that visibility matters; it turns “art” from spectacle into a practice people can imagine themselves entering.
Late year: resilience and institutional momentum
Two late-year signals mattered as much as any single show. First, FEED’s snowstorm postponement of ATOTAL—paired with keeping the space open and honoring tickets—was an integrity moment. A serious institution tells the truth when the plan collapses. Rather than manufacturing a night that didn’t happen, FEED protected audience trust and treated transparency as part of its public contract.
Second, 2025 included tangible building-level investment: the $100,000 ECGRA Anchor Building Grant announced for FEED and Erie Art Company’s State Street property. That grant is more than a number. It is a public signal that media art is not peripheral to Erie’s development story—it is an anchor use, worth improving infrastructure around, because it generates foot traffic, identity, and a repeatable reason to be downtown.
What FEED contributed to Erie in 2025
Cultural contribution: making media art local and normal
Erie does not need media art as a novelty. It needs it as a discipline—something that belongs here, that local artists can practice, and that audiences can learn to read. In 2025, FEED helped normalize media work as repeatable public experience, not a rare special event. That is how a scene grows: people encounter projection, sound installation, interactive systems, and live media performance repeatedly in a trusted downtown venue, until the conversation shifts from “What is this?” to “What else can this be?”
Community contribution: a civic room for attention, belonging, and participation
FEED’s strongest community move in 2025 was not a slogan or a campaign; it was designing formats that make people feel included without flattening the work. Salons, marathons, screenings with talks, and participatory installations created multiple entry ramps. Someone can arrive through a performance night, a community meetup, a curiosity-driven walk-in, or a structured artist talk—and still end up inside the same media-arts ecosystem.
Participation also carried real weight. Waiting for Your Response is a model of audience engagement that refuses superficiality: it asks for a piece of the public’s lived experience, then treats that contribution as part of the work’s evolving presence. That kind of invitation builds belonging without pandering—and it trains a community to take contemporary art seriously.
Economic contribution: downtown rhythm, repeat visits, and creative retention
Cultural impact becomes economic impact when it produces repeatable downtown motion. FEED’s 2025 programming emphasized frequency and duration—long-run exhibitions, consistent public hours, and anchor events that bring people back multiple times. That pattern supports restaurants, bars, parking, and adjacent businesses. It also supports something harder to measure but more important over time: retention of creative people who might otherwise leave for “bigger” cities.
A media art center that is active, credible, and visible changes the calculus for artists and cultural workers deciding whether Erie can be a home base. In 2025, FEED strengthened that argument: it offered proof that ambitious contemporary work can happen here, publicly, and with continuity.
Why media art matters here: Erie as a small-room advantage
Large cities have scale; Erie can have intensity. FEED’s structural advantage is the small room: a tuned black-box environment where the audience is close enough to feel sound as physical force and see light as texture, not just image. In that context, media art becomes intimate rather than distant, and the public encounter becomes less like consumption and more like presence.
In 2025, FEED used that advantage to create experiences that are hard to replicate in larger, noisier markets: less spectacle for spectacle’s sake, more focus on the nervous system, the body, and the collective moment of attention. That is a competitive advantage for Erie—not despite its size, but because of it.
Pressure points FEED should keep, not avoid
The most productive tension in FEED’s 2025 story is the one that should not be resolved—it should be managed. FEED’s growth depends on holding contradictions without blinking: building new audiences while protecting the experimental edge; maintaining a true R&D lab (Sandbox) while meeting the operational realities of public programming; inviting outside artists into Erie without making the city feel like a stop on someone else’s tour; and keeping the room weird and the doors open at the same time. If FEED can keep these tensions visible—and make choices transparently when tradeoffs appear—it will strengthen both trust and artistic credibility.
Looking ahead: 2026 as a hinge year
If 2025 proved FEED can operate as a living system, 2026 becomes the question of stamina and coherence. The goal is not simply “more.” The goal is a clearer identity the public can repeat back in one sentence, and a program stack that protects experimentation while expanding access.
The strongest next step is to treat 2025 as an operating baseline: keep the long-run exhibition rhythm, strengthen residency throughput, publish clearer program families (Exhibitions, Residencies, Live Events, Community Formats), and measure what matters—repeat attendance, artist outcomes, and downtown activation. The work is already compelling; the next challenge is making the system legible enough that Erie can claim it as part of its identity, not just its calendar.
Because once a city learns that its downtown can deliver genuine contemporary media art—consistently, ethically, and with bite—there’s no clean way to unlearn it.
Selected links (for publication)
Broken Sculpture — https://www.feed.art/people-events/broken-sculpture
Palace of Machinery — https://www.feed.art/people-events/palace-of-machinery
Lights on State — https://www.feed.art/people-events/lights-on-state
FEEDback 2025 — https://www.feed.art/newsroom/feedback-2025-12-hour-music-amp-media-marathon
OPENFEED — https://www.feed.art/open-feed
Waiting for Your Response — https://www.feed.art/people-events/waiting-for-your-response
Erie Reader (animation screening coverage) — https://www.eriereader.com/article/a-fluid-empathy-feed-screens-two-locally-animated-shorts
Anchor building grant announcement — https://erieartcompany.org/feed-media-art-center-erie-art-company-receive-100000-anchor-building-grant/