MUTEK is now internationally renowned for its cutting-edge digital programming. With venues on 4 continents and in 7 cities, the festival has built up a unique model. The nerve center of this network is Montreal, which celebrates its 25th anniversary from August 19 to 25, 2024, and will welcome tens of thousands of visitors. An opportunity to talk with Alain Mongeau, founder and artistic director of MUTEK, and Sarah Mackenzie, director of MUTEK Forum, about the evolution of the festival and its programming.
“In 2000, I used to say that our ecosystem was two trains behind what was being done in the field of digital creation in Europe,” jokes Alain Mongeau. The anecdote makes you smile when you consider what MUTEK has become 25 years later: nearly 820,000 festival-goers worldwide, half of them at events held in Montreal, the city where the story began. Several franchises have since appeared in Santiago, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Tokyo and Dubai. “As soon as the festival opened in Montreal, several cities were keen to establish connections. In 2001, the CTM festival programmed an evening called “Go MUTEK”. That’s what got the international momentum going,” says Alain Mongeau, before continuing, “Everything has always been done very organically. For example, the first international edition took place in Valparaiso with Dandy Jack and Ricardo Villalobos. I already had personal ties with Chile.”
MUTEK has thus developed gradually over two decades, with a “franchise” (“license”) system that is bearing fruit. “Our network gives us an edge when it comes to spotting emerging artists. Each festival retains the MUTEK DNA but thrives in its own culture. What’s more, we’ve built up an exceptional distribution circuit to promote Quebec’s creative scene,” explains Alain Mongeau. In Montreal, of the 1,105 artists programmed, 578 were from Quebec and Canada, and many of them have gone on to appear at other MUTEK festivals, such as Montrealer Martin Messier, an artist at the intersection of sound, light and choreographic gesture who, in 2024, will present his performance 1 drop 1000 years at MUTEK Barcelona or MUTEK Mexico.
Broader acceptance of digital creation
In 2000, the festival was born out of a desire to present sound performances, but today it’s hard to pigeonhole it into any clear-cut categories, as is the case with Daito Manabe, musician, designer, creative technologist and unclassifiable jack-of-all-trades. Alain Mongeau explains: “At the time, we were determined to give digital culture a noble status. I was curious about the electro rave scene. It wasn’t just for the music, but also for everything that was starting to emerge around the musicians, such as scenography and VJing. We were beginning to talk about the convergence of the digital world. The challenge for MUTEK was to move in the direction of media hybridization“. So it’s hardly surprising to see dozens of eclectic performances this year (August 20-25), with Alain Mongeau’s favorites including “Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet‘s live show and a concert by one of the ‘local heroes’, Patrick Watson.” As for Sarah Mackenzie, she enthusiastically evokes Eno, a documentary by Gary Hustwit: “It’s a generative performance-film made from archives and interviews with Brian Eno, with a soundtrack he composed himself. It’s a performance that’s never the same.”
An artistic decompartmentalization, then, at a time when music, gaming and VR are easily lumped together under the same heading, that of “digital creation”, or even “immersive creation”. “Definitions are constantly evolving. Like the Tribeca festival, we believe that XR can no longer be confined to VR headsets. The immersive spectrum is part of a larger concept, that of experience,” adds Sarah Mackenzie. And if definitions are changing, so are the perceptions of different eco-systems. “In Quebec, the Minister of Culture has made digital creativity one of his three development priorities. The digital environment is finally beginning to be recognized as an economic value and a driver of innovation,” analyzes Alain Mongeau.
Reconciling ecology and digital technology?
The use of the word “innovation” is worthy of in-depth debate, so much so has this term made its appearance in the pantheon of capitalism’s words. In other words, what are we talking about? Economic performance? How can it be reconciled with ecological issues? “These are profound questions. Many questions are still open: for example, how do we manage the issue of travel for festival-goers or artists? We’re working on this through a number of initiatives. When an international artist comes to Montreal, we try to program him or her on other activities, so as not to simply do a “hit and run”. We’re also looking at solutions such as telepresence (see article ‘Live performance needs R&D‘), a device developed by SAT,” says Sarah Mackenzie.
Ecology is therefore at the heart of the programming, especially on the occasion of MUTEK Forum, an event dedicated more to professional audiences and held only at MUTEK Montreal. Far from favoring a quantitatively sober program, the festival has, on the contrary, pulled out all the stops in 2024. “We’ve chosen not to restrict the number of speakers, to encourage the emergence of collective imaginations. Ecology will be a cross-cutting theme,” explains Sarah Mackenzie. First with the Future Festivals Summit, scheduled for August 19, inviting over 100 local and international festival players to reflect on the future of festivals, and through artistic performances stimulating exchanges.
Then, from August 20 to 23, 90 experts in the fields of artificial intelligence, XR, music and gaming are invited to take part in conferences and round tables. For example, Norhan Bayomi, researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), environmental scientist, architect, inventor and producer of electronic music, will open the forum with a performative speech entitled “Inspiring climate action through AI and art”. Or Berlin-based artist Portrait XO, who will transform a century’s worth of climate anomaly data into sound experiments. It remains to be seen what future MUTEKs, in Montreal and elsewhere, will emerge from all these reflections.
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