MUTEK = musique/c technologie/y That seems a pretty safe guess given this from MUTEK’s Mission page,

Launched in the year 2000, MUTEK is dedicating itself to the presentation of live electronic music and real-time audiovisual performance, making it one of the rare outlets in North America for such innovations. After 20 years, the festival’s future-seeking mandate has matured—and while the promise has in many ways caught up with the present—its commitment to the ongoing mutations and variations of contemporary digital creativity remain, with its eyes and ears still fixated on what comes next.

The festival extends now to 6 days and nights—and integrates the professional Forum into the architecture of the week to enrich conversations and encounters with current technologically driven practices and philosophies. Plugged into a global circuit since inception, creating an international rendezvous for artists and publics alike, the festival thrives on creating a context for discovery and exchange. Faithful to its values of inclusion and accessibility, MUTEK is committed to a more equitable and representative programming of all diversities, in particular through the Amplify initiative.

It also magnifies Montréal, not just as its urban backdrop, but as the source of so much of its creative soul; the local is always elevated in dialogue with exceptional artists from around the world.

MUTEK has built a unique model over the years that has proven seductively exportable. Tentacles stretch across 4 continents, to 6 other cities now, with each satellite adapting the festival’s template of values as a means to inspire new ways of engaging with the richness of electronic and digital artistry.

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I have two Wikipedia entries for MUTEK. Bear with me, the contrast is striking, first the English language version, Note: Links have been removed,

MUTEK is a Montreal-based festival dedicated to the promotion of electronic music and the digital arts.^[1] Its central platform is an annual six-day event in Montreal that takes place in late August.^[2] Alongside the Montreal edition, MUTEK also hosts international versions of its festival.

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Now, the French language version, Note: Links have been removed,

MUTEK est un festival de musique électronique et de créativité numérique qui a lieu annuellement à Montréal depuis 2000. La plateforme centrale de l’organisme constitue le festival qui se tient chaque année à la fin du mois d’août dans le Quartier des spectacles à Montréal^[1].

La mission principale du festival est d’offrir aux artistes les plus originaux et visionnaires du domaine, un tremplin visant à les faire connaître et les propulser le plus loin possible dans leur concept de création tout en visant la sensibilisation et le développement de nouveaux publics. L’engagement continu envers l’innovation et la promotion de la créativité contemporaine fait de MUTEK une organisation majeure dans le monde de la musique électronique en direct et de la performance audiovisuelle en temps réel^[2].

I especially like the part where the festival offers artists, who are the most imaginary and visionary in their domains, a springboard … . So much more ebullient than the English language version, which collapses two paragraphs into one.

MUTEK Montréal Festival 2026

From the Montréal MUTEK organization Welcome homepage,

Edition 27: Amplify & Resonate

MUTEK Montréal Festival returns to the Quartier des spectacles from August 25 to 30, 2026, for six days and nights dedicated to electronic music, audiovisual performances and digital creativity.

This 27th edition brings together international artists, leading figures of the current scene and emerging voices in a program focused on live performance, sonic experimentation and immersive audiovisual experiences. In the heart of downtown Montréal, the festival unfolds across a network of venues connecting concert halls, immersive spaces and outdoor stages.

Over five distinct series, the Festival moves through different energies, aesthetics, and ways of experiencing sound, image, and space.

Explore the Schedule

Artists

A Guy Called Gerald | Abulzooz | Ah! Kosmos and Hainbach | Alan Harman | Arbor and Tzu Ni | aria | ArtSaves | Barker | BelleyFERRIS | Ben UFO | chiquitamagic | Cleo Leigh | con secuencias + Milo Reinhardt | Cry (Kilbourne & Relaxer) | CUERPOS | Dana Ruh | Dave Huismans (ex_libris) | Debit | dustbunny | ebb | El Ángel Exterminador & Anastasiia Vorobiova | ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS! | Elsewhere in India ft. Murthovic & Thiruda | Estelle Schorpp & charline dally | Evicshen | Facta | Fennesz & Lillevan | Florence-Delphine Roux | gyrofield | Hermanos Riffo Gómez | Honeydrip | Hot Sleepers | Ida Toninato | Istanbul Ghetto Club | JakoJako | jamvvis + YFBOB | Jeff Mills | Jenn Mong & Trevor Van de Velde | Jordan Gardner | JS Baillat & Mateo Murphy | Julian Sartorius | Jump Source | Kali Malone | Kara-Lis Coverdale | Korea Town Acid & Ajeebsir | M Salaciak | Marc-Antoine Barbier | Marie Delprat | Matt & Mark Thibideau | Matthew Herbert | Matthew Herbert & Julian Sartorius | Mia Koden | Monsieurmadam | MOORE + SALAS | Nazar | Nelly-Eve Rajotte | NGL Flounce | Noémi Büchi | NVST | Patche | Paul Vivien | Pick a Piper | pliq | Poirier | Polygonia | Purelink with Mika Oki | Rival Consoles | Sara Persico & Mika Oki | Sarah Rossy | shn shn | Super Galaxy Meow Meow | Tristan Perich & James McVinnie | Violent Magic Orchestra | Voices From The Lake | wetdogg | Zora Jones | 16:9 ratio

[Note: I apologize to the artists but with such a large number of names {over 50 of them} I will not be adding their names to the tagging for this posting.]

Discover the artists

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If you go to the Montréal MUTEK organization Welcome homepage and scroll down past the excerpts included here, you’ll find a a SoundCloud playlist for Edition 27. Enjoy!

MUTEK Forum 2026: Symbiotic Frequencies

Here’s a description from the MUTEK website’s forum page,

For 26 years, MUTEK has supported Montréal’s leadership in digital arts by promoting its culture, creators, and fostering local and international collaborations, as one of the world’s first festivals native to digital culture.

Within this context, MUTEK Forum serves as a dynamic platform bridging digital art, electronic music, and cutting-edge technology. Through its curated programs, the Forum addresses critical global challenges and supports artists, thinkers, and innovators in developing transformative ideas and projects. By partnering with leading research institutions, cultural organizations, and industry leaders, the Forum is a recognized marketplace for experimentation and exchange, nurturing new (and existing) alliances and collaborations within the digital arts.

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Now, from the MUTEK Forum website’s Symbiotic Frequencies webpage,

MUTEK Forum returns for its 12th edition with a renewed sense of ambition. New venues, an expanded program, and a theme that sets the tone for three days of radical imagination and curated exchange.

This opening session welcomes attendees, introduces the week’s trajectory, and unpacks the ideas at the heart of Symbiotic Frequencies, a theme exploring the entangled relationship between technology, creativity, ecology, and human connection. Expect an overview of the key moments to catch, the people shaping them, and the threads that will run through it all.

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The Symbiotic Frequencies for MUTEK Forum 2026 has an Acttivities Schedule page, which lists a number of intriguing presentations. Here are a few that particularly interest me,

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Does an AI God Have an Ass?

From Wednesday, August 26, 2026
2:15 pm_3:00 pm

Zach Blas is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto whose practice contends with computational technologies, their industries, and the powers that that constitute and animate them. In this lecture performance, he traces an intriguing arc from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to the techno-religiosity of Silicon Valley, exposing the religious unconscious lurking beneath contemporary AI fantasy and the systematic erasure of embodiment it requires. Through encounters with AI gods, Blas reveals what the divine machine mythology conceals: the bodies, labour and invisible workers who actually make the system run.

Part of his Silicon Traces trilogy which contends with the histories, beliefs, and fantasies shaping Silicon Valley’s visions of domination, the performance connects to CULTUS (2023), a moving image installation probing tech industry belief systems, and the artist book Ass of God (2024), published by the Vienna Secession and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. Irreverent, meticulous and pointedly in tune with Symbiotic Frequencies: a reminder that every network has a body and every god has a supply chain.

Content warning: for adult audiences and contains explicit sexual material, including graphic descriptions of sexuality and AI-generated images of nudity.

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.

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Cosmos to Quanta in 10 Terms: Curators’ Take

From Thursday, August 27, 2026
10:00 am_10:30 am

Opening the day, curatorial duo Auronda Scalera and Alfredo Cramerotti, known for projects including Art Dubai Digital, Noor Riyadh, Web to Verse at Manchester Metropolitan University/MODAL, and Cosmotechnics at Fondazione Querini Stampalia in occasion of the Venice Biennale, deliver a keynote that traces how curatorial practice has been fundamentally transformed over the last decade by technology, co-creation, and new modes of perception and knowledge production.

The talk unfolds as a constellation of ten key concepts that have shaped and continue to shape our thinking and practice : some drawn from thinkers including Yuk Hui, Donna Haraway, Félix Guattari, and Hito Steyerl; others coined within their own practice, among them Hyper-Imaging, Oneironaut, Quantum Curating and Nachleben Digitalis.

Each term marks a moment where curatorial thinking expanded and reinvented itself in dialogue with art, technology, and philosophy. Together, they form the vocabulary of a practice built on co-inhabiting, co-imagining, and co-becoming with artists, machines, and publics.

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.

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Brainless : How the World Thinks

From Thursday, August 27, 2026
1:00 pm_1:30 pm

What if intelligence was never located in the brain to begin with?

Claire L. Evans is a writer, artist, and cultural critic whose work sits at the intersection of technology, science and human imagination – best known as the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet and as a member of pop group YACHT.

In this keynote, Evans invites us to look beyond the human brain to explore purely embodied modes of intelligence. Drawing on diverse manifestations of intelligence in the natural world, she considers the potential of biological computing and asks what nature’s own systems grown rather than mined can teach us about the future of AI and the many shapes intelligence can take.

This talks sits close to the heart of Symbiotic Frequencies, a reminder that the most sophisticated networks on Earth predate the silicon chip by billions of years.

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.

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Build it Or Buy it? Creativity and Intellectual Property (IP)

From Thursday, August 27, 2026
3:30 pm_4:20 pm

Immersive creation moves in both directions. Sometimes it starts as something specific, built by a team of collaborators chasing an idea, and only later has to figure out how to scale, tour, or license without losing what made it worth experiencing in the first place. Other times, it starts from an existing intellectual property (IP), a story, a universe, a character, and the challenge is the opposite: how do you adapt something that already exists into a memorable immersive experience, rather than just repackaging it?

Either direction raises the same underlying question: what makes original IP a real strategic asset, not just a single work, but a universe, a clear authorship, a concept with enough depth to open doors to financing, partnerships, adaptations, and wider audience reach?

This panel brings together IP specialists, performing arts centers, LBE venues, and creative studios, including The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, PHI, Mance Communications, and Supply + Demand, to talk about that pressure point. Can you adapt interdisciplinary, experimental work into something that travels and sustains itself without sanding off its edges? Can an adaptation of an existing IP still feel like a genuine immersive creation, rather than a licensing exercise? Is there a version of “successful” that doesn’t mean “safe,” especially now, when AI can generate a thousand versions of “safe” in seconds?

Rather than treating scale and commercial viability as the enemy of creativity, this conversation looks at how the best studios build IP, adapted or original, as a foundation for long-term creative and business development, without losing the strangeness, and the human point of view, that made the work worth building in the first place.

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Symbiotic Frequencies / Symbiotic Futures : A Worldbuilding Workshop presented by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

From Friday, August 28, 2026
10:00 am_1:00 pm

Advance registration is sold out. Extra spots available 15 min before, first come first served.

Calling all artists, musicians, designers, writers, filmmakers, creative technologists, and curious future-builders.

What kind of world would give rise to entirely new forms of music, instruments, and creative expression?

In this collaborative 3-hour workshop, participants will use worldbuilding as a creative design process to imagine and build a shared future civilization. Together, we’ll explore how values, technologies, ecologies, cultures and social systems shape everyday life—and how changing one part of a world transforms everything else.

Inspired by MUTEK’s 2026 theme, Symbiotic Frequencies, the workshop invites participants to question our evolving relationships with artificial intelligence, living systems, artistic practice and technological infrastructures. Rather than predicting the future, we’ll collectively imagine one that is guided by curiosity, care and creativity.

Working with natural and found materials, participants will craft a physical artifact from this imagined world—an experimental musical instrument that reflects the world’s cultural identity, a tangible expression of the world’s history, values and way of life.

As the world evolves through conversation and collaboration, facilitator-led AI visualization will create an evolving visual backdrop that brings the participants’ ideas to life in real time. These visual interpretations serve as a shared environment for reflection and discussion, while participants remain focused on the collaborative process of worldbuilding and hands-on making.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have co-created a richly imagined world, contributed to its visual identity, and leave with a handcrafted artifact from the future—a unique piece of the civilization they built together.

This workshop is a collaboration between worldbuilding facilitator Paisley Smith and Vincent McCurley, Designer, Creative Technologies at the National Film Board of Canada’s Innovation Lab.

No prior technical knowledge required.

Visual references are created by the facilitators using locally run, open-source AI tools. Participants do not use AI directly; they create their artifacts by hand using physical materials. AI is used only to visualize the group’s evolving world and support discussion.

Please note: This activity will be in English only, without live transcription nor translation. During the event, no interpreter for the Deaf will be present.

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Listening at the Edge: Sound, Quantum Physics, and the Act of Attention

From Friday, August 28, 2026
1:30 pm_2:15 pm

Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice asked us to expand our awareness to include all sounds, inner and outer. Quantum physics, in a strange parallel, describes a universe where observation itself changes what is observed. This session brings those two ideas into dialogue, gathering quantum physicists, composers, sonic healers, and curators to ask: what is listening? and does the physics of uncertainty change the answer?

The conversation moves between registers. Alexandre Blais, professor at Universite de Sherbrooke and co-creator of circuit quantum electrodynamics, brings the science that underlies these institutions, while sound artist and composer France Jobin finds ways to make that science felt rather than simply understood, most recently with Lueurs quantiques and The Fluctuation of Emptiness. Composer and performer Kara-Lis Coverdale approaches the same territory from a different angle, working across electronic music and pipe organ to build sonic environments that dissolve the boundaries between musical systems and languages. And Rena Anakwe, interdisciplinary artist and NEW INC [New Museum’s cultural incubator] cohort member, grounds the conversation in the body, weaving sound, scent, and traditional healing to ask how reconnecting to nature, and to one another might itself be a form of listening.

Moderated by Eva Fischer of CIVA [Contemporary Immersive Visual Art] Festival and presented by NEW INC

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.

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That first one about whether or not an AI god has an ass reminded me of a programme (Culturama) I watched on RadioCanada, Les fesses (although I remembered the title as L’univers des fesses),

Les fesses

Accompagnée d’Elkahna Talbi, Catherine Trudeau et de Thomas Leblanc, Chantal Lamarre se penche sur la représentation des fesses dans la culture. De l’oeuvre de Spencer Tunick à la Vénus de Willendorf, en passant par Deux femmes en or et le French cancan, nombreuses sont les fesses qui ont marqué notre imaginaire.

The rest of the items relate to one or other of topics covered here: brains, quantum science, sound, intellectual property, etc.

h/t to Kris Krüg for mention of MUTEK in one of his communications to the community.

Finally, If you happen to be in Montréal, perhaps you’ll be able to catch some of presentations..