MUTEK lights up Montreal with six days of digital creation and conversations

The festival of electronic music and digital creativity gathered global talent downtown

Fringe ArtsIndia Das-Brown — Published August 27, 2025 3 minutes

For six days and nights, the festival stitched together real-time audiovisual performances and talks in the heart of the Quartier des spectacles, rewarding both the curious technophile and the electronic music buff. 

Over 120 artists from 26 countries shared their approaches, many premiering in Montreal, across 17 programs. 

The 11th edition of the MUTEK Forum—a platform and marketplace for “bold ideas in digital creation”—ran from Aug. 20 to Aug. 22. It brought together artists, institutions, researchers, technology professionals, digital experts and curators. 

A program of talks, artist performance lectures, masterclasses, workshops, screenings, listening sessions and networking events highlighted recent, innovative and inspiring practices in digital creation.

Among these was a 10-minute skit by Encode Canada, the Canadian chapter of Encode, a youth-led nonprofit advocating for safety and equity in AI. Six of the chapter’s youth representatives roleplayed contrasting futures: one with transparency, culture and equity, and the other without it.

Structured like a live software patch, “System Reboot” showcased the unravelling of what the group calls “extractive, top-down decision-making models” in AI, imagining what governance could look like if built like an open-source project.

“I was really happy and seeing everybody, like the whole team, finally get out what we've been working so hard on,” said Whi-Ming Joseph, a web designer for Encode Canada and a computer science student at Concordia University. “It was really nice to see it on stage and hear everybody laugh.”

According to MUTEK, the Forum focuses on ethical considerations and ecological sustainability in technology. Spanning music, AI, Extended Reality (XR), media art, gaming, quantum computing, architecture, and design, the Forum explored the intersections of art, technology and science, fostering fresh collaborations and exchange.

Friday’s keynote speaker was multi-Emmy and BAFTA-winning composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer. The Chilean-Canadian films score composer is known for his inventive, genre-defying scores in Utopia, Black Mirror, The White Lotus, and Babygirl.

Tapia de Veer explained that behind his tracks' otherworldly vocals and unconventional instrumentation is constant trial, error and experimentation. He described the process behind the sound of The White Lotus’s theme song, known for sounding at once familiar and strange.

“I’m always trying to find a way of making a vocal interesting to me [so] it sounds kind of weird,” Tapia de Veer said, “but not weird in the sense of using vocoders or any kind of effect that sounds like a robot or something like that, but more in the sense that somebody would not sing, actually, humanly possibly sing something like that.”

For host and musician Jarrett Martineau, the approach has proven effective. “The runaway success of The White Lotus theme,” Martineau said, “that shows the reach of some of the work that [Tapia de Veer] has done.”

The Forum also introduced new formats, industry collaborations and demos from the AI Ecologies Lab, MUTEK’s interdisciplinary residency program to develop sustainable AI tools for the digital arts. 

The festival further featured the MUTEK Market component, where emerging Quebec and Canadian artists connected with international presenters, the intention being to open doors to collaboration and new professional opportunities.

As part of the annual festival, Concordia’s Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, the Applied AI Institute, and the Hexagram Network also presented exhibitions, workshops and labs. These initiatives invited the public to engage with artificial intelligence, digital ritual and feminist tech practices in playful and critical ways.