Radical Rituals and AI Futures: Rethinking Creation Governance, and Storytelling at MUTEK Forum 2025
Header Image: Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy & AI4Media / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
From August 20-22, MUTEK Forum 2025, under the theme Radical Rituals, invites participants to reimagine their relationship to digital creation through three acts—Storytelling, Technology, and Practices—tracing how sustainable tools, collective ownership, and diverse intelligences reshape how we sense, create, and relate.
Throughout the week, AI emerges not as a siloed topic, but as a transversal force: permeating talks, workshops, performances, and installations alike. Whether challenging extractive systems, co-authoring new forms of narrative, or generating immersive environments in real-time, AI becomes both subject and medium—a tool to question, a language to perform, and a site for radical reimagination. From conference stages to urban public space, the MUTEK pulses with critical and creative explorations of artificial intelligence as it becomes increasingly embedded in our cultural and technological rituals.
Day 1: Storytelling – Rethinking Narrative Through AI (Presented by the Canada Media Fund)
The first day of MUTEK Forum 2025 delves into how artificial intelligence is transforming storytelling, from poetic expression to immersive voice-driven performance and sustainable narrative futures.
Dadabots – Opening Manifesto and Prompt Me Installation
AI provocateurs Dadabots set the tone for the Forum with a radical opening manifesto exploring narrative disruption through machine creativity. Dadabots will premiere a new participatory installation at MUTEK Forum, inviting audiences to generate the most improbable music imaginable—an AI-powered sonic buffet blending absurd prompts and experimental sound. The results will culminate in a regurgitated remix served as audio hors-d'œuvres during the Forum's grand finale.
Masterclass: AIxVOICE: Augmented Intelligent Voices – Harry Yeff (Reeps100) & Bertie Sampson (immersive-me)
This
masterclass investigates how AI, the human voice, and visual language
combine to forge new narrative forms and ethical frameworks for
generative storytelling.
Performance Lecture: The Poet’s Code: Human Voice in the Digital Age – Sasha Stiles Language artist Sasha Stiles performs live AI-generated poetry while reflecting on how ancient poetic technologies intersect with the future of human-machine expression.
Public Showcase: MUTEK AI Ecologies Lab
The day concludes with a showcase of six forward-thinking projects from the MUTEK AI Ecologies Lab, highlighting interdisciplinary experiments in sustainable and culturally meaningful AI practices, including talks from AI and ecologies experts, as well as a panel and meet up organized by La Piscine.
Day 2: Technology – Future Interfaces and Machine Relations
The second day of MUTEK Forum 2025 explores how transformative technologies—from Indigenous AI to speculative machine relations—are reshaping how we interface with the world and one another.
Performance Lecture: Cosmologyscape – Suzanne Kite, presented by The Indigenous Screen Office
Oglála Lakȟóta artist and researcher Suzanne Kite presents a performative lecture and immersive performance merging Lakȟóta epistemologies, AI, and sensor-driven storytelling in a poetic reflection on relationality, cosmos, and ethical technology.
Exhibition: Machinic Encounters
This provocative exhibition, led by the Machine Agencies research group and presented by Milieux Institute, Applied AI and the Hexagram Network, invites participants to rethink human-machine relations through experimental works that center ambiguity, reciprocity, and awe—moving beyond utilitarian paradigms to imagine more enchanted, disruptive encounters with AI.
Day 3: Practices – Ethical Futures in Creation and Governance
The final day of MUTEK Forum 2025 centers on sustainable, inclusive, and responsible AI practices, with a focus on commons-based infrastructures, youth-led futures, and reimagined governance models.
Panel: What We Had in Common… On Loss, Extraction, Art and the AI Commons
This critical panel hosted by the ArtIA consortium explores how extractive AI practices deplete our shared commons, offering transatlantic case studies and alternative models for building an AI Commons rooted in sustainability, equity, and cultural agency.
Performance: System Reboot, with Encode Canada
In a spoken-word software patch performance, youth from Encode Canada confront the failures of today’s AI governance and call for collective, open-source protocols that center transparency, equity, and future-facing justice.
Workshop: Computational Witchcraft Sleepover, presented by Abundant Intelligences Throughout this interdisciplinary workshop, participants will work together to build a data altar that will serve as a starting point for experimenting with various divinatory models, both digital and analog. By subverting the aesthetics and languages usually associated with institutional or corporate technologies, this space draws inspiration from a variety of practices to explore the links between technology, imagination, and social transformation.
Botto: The Decentralized Autonomous Artist
Throughout the day, Simon Hudson will give a demo of Botto, an autonomous artist governed by a decentralized community, showcasing the project and its recent developments in collective memory, while spotlighting the challenges of community governance and AI economies.
Box Office
MUTEK Forum offers several ticketing options, including the Forum Passport and the Festival + Forum Passport, along with two new additions: the Student Forum Passport at a fixed price of $90 (+ service fees and taxes) and an additional networking access: MUTEK Match at $100 (+ service fees and taxes, limited availability).
Discover the Minds Behind MUTEK Forum 2025
MUTEK Match (Aug. 21), presented by OASIS Immersion
MUTEK unveils the cohorts for its artist support programs
MUTEK Forum Returns with Radical Rituals: 100+ Creators, Innovators, and Practitioners Shaping the Future of Digital Creation
