Day 3 | Ethical Futures: Practices

The final act of MUTEK Forum 2025 focuses on Ethical Futures: Practices, spotlighting sustainable, inclusive, and responsible approaches to artistic and technological innovation. This day examines the values, tools, and frameworks shaping the future of digital creation—from decentralized models and commons-based infrastructures to artist-led futures for ownership. Participants are invited to critically assess dominant systems and explore alternative modes of making, sharing, and collaborating.

Award-winning artist and activist Madame Gandhi joins us for a special fireside chat in collaboration with EarthPercent, the environmental charity founded by Brian Eno, to explore the role of music in advancing climate justice.

Music software and hardware maker Ableton will present Ableton Spaces, an interactive sonic playground where visitors can engage with Push and the new Ableton Move. The space will host hands-on demos, artist conversations, and immersive activities that invite new ways of shaping sound and sparking creative ideas.

McKenzie Wark—writer, theorist, and performer—will deliver a signature reading with live beats from her books Raving and Love and Money, Sex and Death, followed by an in-depth conversation on techno-sensuality, queer rave culture, and the poetics of refusal.

FEMINAE NOX presents Resisting Artwashing: Building Artist-Led Futures in Music and Culture, a powerful panel unpacking how performative diversity and institutional extraction without investment operate across the music industry. The conversation will feature the founders of FEMINAE NOX, Salome Asega, Director of NEW INC., and other guests examining how grassroots initiatives, artists-led models, and community-centered collectives are reimagining festival, show, and venue ecosystems. FEMINAE NOX will also present a companion masterclass, Blueprint to Block Party: How to Build Your Own DIY Festival Space.

Rethinking Ownership: Building New Models for Music begins with a book talk from Liz Pelly (Mood Machine) on reimagining power in music, followed by a roundtable with Austin Robey (Subvert) and Peggy Hogan (Next Door Records), who will explore cooperative alternatives to extractive music platforms.

The panel What We Had in Common… On Loss, Extraction, Art and the AI Commons brings together artist Portrait XO, Serpentine Arts Technologies programme, SAT, and Sporobole to examine how AI systems deplete shared resources—and how creatives are advancing strategies for a sustainable and reciprocal AI commons, grounded in a one year consultation led throughout the ArtIA initiative. In dialogue, Encode Canada will then present a Youth Manifesto for AI Governance — a creative, justice-centered response envisioning more inclusive, transparent, and imaginative futures for AI.

MUTEK Forum 2025 closes with a rare masterclass and Q&A by Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, the award-winning composer behind The White Lotus, Babygirl, UTOPIA, and Black Mirror, offering a behind-the-scenes look at his approach to composition and sound design.

Also featured on Day 3 are artist Q&As with Matthew Biederman, and Guillaume Coutu & Line Katcho; The Body Politic, a hands-on masterclass by experimental composer Ash Fure exploring physicality and sonic chaos through custom-built instruments and embodied live electronics; and a demo of decentralized autonomous artist Botto, with more details to be announced soon.