MUTEK 2026 Visual Campaign: Sinjin Hawke on Crafting…

Interview With Sinjin Hawke

If you’ve spent any time in Montréal’s electronic scene, you’ve likely encountered the work of Sinjin Hawke. Bodies oscillating, liquids colliding, the human and the technological mutating into a bizarrely beautiful whole.

This year, the musician, visual artist, and Fractal Fantasy co-founder was tapped as the architect for MUTEK Festival’s visual campaign.

Below, he unpacks the ideas, influences, and creative processes behind the 27th edition's arresting visuals.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your work has an immediacy that feels both surreal and distinctly human. How would you describe your overall approach to designing?

I’m usually trying to create something that evokes an emotion, some form of beauty that I haven’t felt before... something intriguing that doesn't exist in our physical world. A lot of my works tend to use the human form as the subject, yet I find ways to distort it or combine it with other elements to create new feelings and emotions. Even in music I like to manipulate the human voice into alien, otherworldly textures. I think there’s something about the relatability of the human form that lends itself well to creativity and also creates an immediacy and intentionality to the art.

And with design, I usually just want to create a canvas for these feelings, a space to contextualize these creations and grip the viewer. Typically I like stripped back graphic design that gives space for the art to be as freaky as it wants to be and blossom.

Can you walk us through the key inspirations behind this year’s visual direction? Were there particular ideas, references, or cultural/technological influences that shaped the look and feel?

All this year I’ve been gravitating towards light pink, softness, mixed with metallic monochrome gradients. I’ve been buying a lot of pink flowers, wearing baby pink a lot. I find myself coming back to this season quite a bit ever since I was young. So when devising the colour palette for MUTEK, powder pink seemed like the right direction. I also love the way it interacts with the institutional graphic design of MUTEK. And when working with metallic textures, everyone likes a bit of iridescence. MUTEK is a summer festival, so the iridescence brought a bit more colour into the mix.

For the forms, I thought a bit about my past interactions with MUTEK and what the essence of MUTEK is. For me, it’s human symbiosis with technology to create new forms of celebration. I felt some form of melting between human and machine, not in a cyberpunk way but more in a soft beautiful liquid metal way. I also researched bioluminescent and biotransparent animals because they seem to look as if they are half technology half organic. I did a lot of experiments making these aesthetics more human and combining them with different objects.

I also researched this era of 2000s audio tech—walkmans, mp3 players—where everything was silver, melted, bulbous and rounded, with almost organic curves… It felt somehow of the same universe as these melting metallic human bioluminescent machinations that were in my head.

What drew you to collaborate with MUTEK for this year’s visual campaign? Was there something about the festival’s identity, history, or audience that resonated with your practice?

I think MUTEK is one of the most important music/art institutions in the world; I’m so grateful it exists. They created a space where new experimentations with music and art can be showcased and celebrated in such a fun way. I’ve been performing and working with MUTEK for almost 10 years now, in Montreal, Japan, Mexico City, and every time it’s an experience where I learn, have fun, and meet likeminded people.

MUTEK FRACTAL FANTASY SINJIN HAWK ZORA JONES ungraded DSC00241 2666

In my art practice, I try to leverage the latest advances in technology to find new ways to evoke beauty. I think MUTEK is an organization devoted to this pursuit and to bringing global communities together to enjoy these new experiences, so I feel a deep resonance with their mission.

What was the collaborative process like? Was there a moment when the core concept really clicked into place?

Working with MUTEK is always a dream. The whole team was really receptive to the direction I took, it was also kind of an experimental year because this was the first time they decided to collaborate with an artist rather than a design firm. So I think it was quite brave of them to go with someone like me who is a bit eccentric aesthetically, and doesn’t come from a graphic design background.

The concept clicked in place when I had my first brainstorm meeting with the MUTEK team, they loved the direction I had chosen, and helped me flesh it out a bit more.

What tools, software, or techniques did you rely on for this project? Did you experiment with anything new along the way?

I was going for surrealism and melting a lot of aesthetics together, so I trained some models on bioluminescent and biotransparent creatures. Another model was trained on all my past 3D work that I’ve done in Maya/WebGL/GLSL/Blender, just to add a sheen of my past aesthetics which tend to have a lot of liquid metal elements. I also trained a model on a very specific type of iridescence I was after, used a lot of ComfyUI, ControlNET, and obviously a lot of Photoshop. It took quite a bit of experimentation and iteration to find the design language.

Does this collaboration with MUTEK mark any kind of shift or evolution in your practice? How do you see this experience influencing your work going forward?

Yes, it does feel like an evolution in my practice. I’m primarily a musician, and most of my visual work in the past was done to support my label or my music. I never saw myself as a visual artist, the visuals were just a part of the musical expression. I suppose this role is one of the first times I’ve been hired to strictly handle visuals. I had requests to do visuals in the past but usually turned them down. But I’m starting to get more and more offers like this, requests to exhibit my visual art at galleries, etc., so it does feel like a part of a larger shift. I will still keep my focus primarily on music, but this is a fun new avenue to explore, and of course it’s an honour to be recognized by MUTEK for this side of my creativity.

What kind of reaction or feeling do you hope audiences have when they encounter the campaign?

I hope people feel intrigued and playful when encountering the campaign, while also maintaining that sense of reverence we all hold for the institution and its history.