…is an international arts centre, based in the city of Ghent. Since our start in 1982 we have presented contemporary performing arts and music, both national and international. We have chosen to move as much as possible away from separate disciplines, and towards cross-bred presentation and experiment. At the same time we feel it is our duty, as one of the more visible cultural players in Ghent, to maintain strong links with the city: its citizens, its organisations, its issues, its policies. Today our team of over 80 specialised and dedicated people serves approximately 275.000 visitors yearly. The Vooruit-building, a unique 10.000 m2 monument in the centre of the city, hosts our staff and provides an ideal presentation platform. It has four stages and as many studios for resident artists. More than music and performing arts, we now present media art, visual arts, debate, and literature. Vooruit has always chosen to look and work towards the future. About five years ago, we realized the digital revolution presented our sector with new challenges and new opportunities. We decided to make it our priority to face and investigate these changes. We started to invest time, people, money, and know-how, in an integrated effort to provide an answer, adapted to our specific sector - the arts. We have started up an artistic media art program and have simultaneously been working on infrastructural 'upgrades'. We are also involved in two research programs that are about digitising our organisation. The media art program is integrated organically into the Vooruit program. We are not presenting an annual 'media art festival' but seek out relevant presentation-formats and interesting collaborations to present media art work. For instance: since three years we have been collaborating with the annual international filmfestival of Gent. During the last edition Vooruit presented a 10day festival under the name 'Almost Cinema' in which artists from the field of media art specifically working on the frontier with cinema were asked to present work. Each spring Vooruit puts on a festival working around a certain theme bringing together artists with backgrounds in media art, performance and music. (Say it now! 2006 – the game is up! 2007). Next to this we also work together closely with Courtisane, an organisation for shortfilm, video and new media, to present their annual festival at Vooruit. Apart from these festivals, we started up a 'salon'series in February 2006 in which people working in the field of media art as artists, curators or critics are invited to talk about their work and address some burning issues, in an informal setting. This fall we also started up a series about 'art and science' with the aim of bringing together (performance)artists and scientists.Turning to in-depth research, we are involved in two projects with academic, technological, and government partners. Both projects, 'Virtual Arts Centre of the Future' (VACF), and 'Wireless Building Automation', are supported by the Flemish Government, through a cooperation with its IBBT (Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology). VACF has a main goal to construct a prototype of the arts centre of the future, as a concrete answer to questions raised by the digitisation process. With our partners, we will develop three prototype demonstrators: a web portal, a 3D digital platform, and a Customer Relationship Management concept. The concepts developed are intended for use by the entire cultural sector. Vooruit is leading the project and will function as a demonstrator case. The project will be presented in February 07.  Eva De Groote, Media art programmer