For its 11th edition, the MUTEK Forum will take place from August 20 to 22 at the Monument-National with a program centered on the theme of “Radical Rituals.” In a rapidly changing world, rituals are becoming essential anchors for individuals and communities. MUTEK invites us to think of radical ritual as a tool of resistance in the face of a particularly unstable sociopolitical context.
The introduction of a new talk-show format reflects the Forum’s willingness to experiment. Hosted by Myriam Achard of the PHI Centre, this program, consisting of five 10-minute segments, examines the future of immersion from the perspective of immersive arts and the new narrative rituals they enable.
Segment 1 – Ana Brzezińska: A Brief History of Immersive Art
Ana Brzezińska, a curator specializing in immersive art, offered a historical perspective that provided a solid foundation for the audience’s reflections. What is immersive art? For her, « It’s virtually anywhere you go. It’s many things, digital or phygital. It’s opening people’s imaginations and democratizing an artistic discourse that has historically been hermetic and intimidating. »
The transition from storytelling to storyliving enables unique forms of engagement and a constant capacity for surprise. This evolution is part of a rich genealogy, from Sensorama to the amusement parks of Coney Island in 1943, to contemporary immersive installations.
Immersion thus becomes a design methodology rather than a simple medium, responding to post-pandemic needs for accessibility, collective experiences, and openness. As Brzezińska points out, immersion must “place people at the heart of the experience, which is more important than the experience itself.”
Segment 2 – Marc Barto: Museums as open laboratories
Marc Barto, senior digital producer at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), presented a vision of museums transformed into open laboratories, where visitors move from a passive role to active engagement. With 2.8 million objects, only 2% of which are on display, museum institutions such as the V&A need to rethink their approach to transform passive visitors into engaged visitors.
Works such as Tidalo, a digital violin for two players by Hazar Emre Tez, and Craig Against the Machine, a semi-automated electric guitar by Craig Scott, illustrate this new approach, where technology enables shared experiences and emotions with the artist and other participants.
Segment 3 – Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes : Questioning technological nature
Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes’ project The Pond constitutes a critical reflection on our contemporary relationship with nature through an immersive multimedia installation. The artist subverts the codes of natural history museum dioramas by creating an artificial ecosystem populated with hybrid creatures, using various technologies (augmented reality, projections, holograms) to question the boundaries between natural and artificial. The work explores how new generations progressively accommodate technological substitute environments in the face of natural world degradation. Within the MUTEK framework, she presents Field of Reeds, an augmented reality experience that transforms everyday urban spaces into lush speculative ecosystems, inviting participants to rediscover a lost relationship with nature by virtually superimposing vibrant jungles onto the modern urban landscape in an alternative future where non-human life has disappeared.
Segment 4 – Ottomata: Pushing the boundaries of interaction
Alexandra Papouin and Hugo Laliberté from Ottomata shared their unique approach to immersion through interaction. Since 2017 and their installation Splinter, they have been seeking to move beyond the buzzword “immersive” to bring more sensitivity to the concept.
Their signature lies in the “zero moment” that instant when a person understands the interaction in a natural, almost inevitable way, without instructions. Their latest installation, TETRA, which you can discover at the Village numérique until August 28, transforms touch into a sensory and collective experience, exploring the invisible forces that surround us and transforming sound and visuals in real time.
Segment 5 – Centre PHI : Inventing a new immersive dramaturgy
Phoebe Greenberg and Julie Tremblay from the PHI Centre concluded with BLUR immersive, a project exploring cloning, resurrection, and genetic editing. Their approach is to combine several disciplines and art forms while maintaining a coherent narrative, creating a new topology of experiences.
The project overlays multiple realities: live performance, animation, AR/VR. The same actor can be presented in a synthetic world, then as an animated character via motion capture, and finally in augmented reality. This revolutionary approach also requires a reinvention of distribution, with theaters paradoxically showing more interest than traditional museums or art centers.
This first day of the MUTEK 2025 Forum outlines the contours of a changing digital creativity. Radical rituals are no longer just anchors in the face of instability, but are becoming tools for actively transforming paradigms.
Between digital ecology, immersive storytelling, and creative resistance, this edition promises to question our relationship with technology and art in a world in perpetual motion. The Forum thus continues its mission: to be a space for exchange where the possible futures of digital creation are shaped.
