MUTEK is a festival dedicated to electronic music and digital creativity. With a focus on discovery and innovation, it offers an eclectic program bringing together local and international artists through six unique immersive evenings, indoors and outdoors, and over 80 live audiovisual performances from August 20 to 25, 2024. To celebrate the festival's 25th anniversary, MUTEK enriches the experience with a trail of digital installations in the heart of the Quartier des spectacles. In parallel, MUTEK Forum will explore the latest trends in creation, artificial intelligence, extended reality, video games and sustainability.
COMPOSITE #40
August 22, 2024 - presented by MUTEK in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture
The Canadian Centre for Architecture is an international research institution founded on the belief that architecture is in the public interest. We produce exhibitions and publications, view our collection as a resource to be developed and shared; we advance research, offer public programs and organize a range of other activities, curious to discover how architecture shapes - and could reshape - contemporary life. We invite collaborators and the general public to participate in our activities, giving new relevance to architectural thinking in the light of current disciplinary and cultural issues.
Emergence is a sensual, surreal and unstable digital theater system. It explores the artistic potential of superimposing AI-based Gaussian splashes, real-time data, simulations, 3D objects, lighting and particles in a live virtual collage. Each element interacts and manipulates the other through this systematic symbiosis. Its aesthetic unpredictability reflects our current times: the combination of rising living costs, extreme weather conditions and political upheaval have shaped our communities and social ties in myriad ways since the onset of the pandemic. With Emergence, we aim to capture an unscripted interactive collage through visual and audio contributions that bear witness to this collective uncertainty, across multiple countries and styles. We propose Emergence as a video projection installation, offering visitors an evolving real-time “mirror” that reflects an image not of the individual, but of the nodes of an integrated whole.
The project: “Rêverie” is a new multidisciplinary project developed by Tati au Miel during their OPEN/WORLD artistic residency. This project will be presented as a solo exhibition in the World Creation Studio gallery and as an audiovisual performance in the Society for Arts and Technology [SAT] dome for MUTEK.
Transplant (2022) uses physiological data, including dance movements and theta-wave brain activity, to generate bio-reactive visuals and sounds. The work explores the concept of “post-body”. A plexus provides an anatomical reference and metaphor for the intertwining of body and mind, as well as a new bilateral form. Mechanically, this metaphor is reflected in the programming, where movement and brain data are intertwined. The small spherical joints of the plexus are textured by a subtle video - a genetic memory - of the artist dancing. The installation is executed in real time, invoking the living animus of the artist's body.
www.grindruberairbnb.exposed (GUA) engages participants in a choreographed performance via their phone. By visiting the website on their smartphone, participants are guided through a series of gestures and actions. Across the group, these movements create a coherent, synchronized performance. By condensing the scale of the network onto one stage, the project offers a vision of atomized actors acting as one, raising the possibility that the global networks that connect us can serve as a tool for collective action.
This multimedia artwork uses Minecraft mods, a customized server, machinima technology and video projection to explore the parallel utopian spatial imaginings of Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price's Fun Palace (1964) and Minecraft modded in 2024. Visitors to Fun Palace were supposed to discover a monumental yet cybernetically adaptable space designed to withstand the booming capitalist leisure industry. Using the utopian element of the monorail, we experiment with the scope, scale, sensory distraction and disjunction we imagine for the Fun Palace. This project proposes a utopian reworking of the most popular video game of all time. The experience combines an avant-garde historical moment with the present of media art, and invites us to rethink the idea of the Fun Palace today.
The research-creation Los Pasos de Mama Killa is inspired by the cultural, political and historical context of the Andean territory and was presented at the Sur Aural 2024 festival in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The field research, embodied in a workshop, was developed as part of the festival's creative residencies, envisaging an artistic approach to co-creation with the women of Cochabamba. The workshop and artistic project were carried out in collaboration with members of the Bolivian community radio collective “Fuga Radial”. We explored exercises in deep listening, counter-mapping and technical aspects of sound production, and developed a sound walk in augmented reality.
Minute announce and inspiration:
- FEMINAE NOX by Seny Kassaye & Mira Silvers
- Residency hidden in nature by hinter live
- Aequitas Music by FEZIHAUS
- Bricolage Architecture by Mathieu Arsenault
- Préserver le Futur: Les défis de conservation des œuvres d’art technologiques by DL Héritage
