Day 1 | Storytelling: Expanding Realities, presented by the Canada Media Fund (CMF)

Presented by the Canada Media Fund (CMF), the first day of the Forum turns storytelling inside out, asking what narrative becomes when it is felt, inhabited, and collectively lived. The day explores how stories emerge from the entangled relationships between bodies, technologies, communities, and imaginaries, opening an invitation to the frontiers of immersive and screen-based storytelling and centering embodiment, accessibility, and distribution as creative imperatives.

Loretta Sarah Todd, Founder and Creative Director of IM4 Lab, an immersive media lab dedicated to Indigenous storytelling and the cultivation of the next generation of Indigenous media makers, delivers the opening address. Her work has long placed Indigenous voices and worldviews at the center of screen culture. Responding to the Forum theme, her talk invites a critical reflection on who gets to tell the stories and how.

The day will be punctuated with talks and performance lectures from some of the most exciting voices in digital culture, including community and media channel New Models (Caroline Busta and Lil Internet), artist and filmmaker Zach Blas, and media alchemist Navid Navab, recipient of this year's Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in Digital Musics. French filmmaker Lou Fauroux offers a focused moment of cinematic dialogue with a screening of her film What Remains, Genesis. A speculative fiction set in 2048, where a digital immortality software developed by Google is hijacked by hackers who democratize its access, weaving together AI, techno-capitalism, collective resistance, and queer futurity.

For the third year in a row, MUTEK is proud to partner with the Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) on Indigenous Immersions, a programming trajectory featuring a selection of activities that highlight Indigenous new media creators, artists, and creative technologists across the full three days of MUTEK Forum. As part of this trajectory, multidisciplinary artist and Sobey Art Award nominee Caroline Monnet, presented by the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) will deliver an artist talk and Q&A moderated by Mojeanne Behzad, curator at MAC.

A handful of sessions explore innovations and topics pertinent to digital creativity. Entangled Spaces: Art, Technology and the Future of Cultural Engagement, presented by Communicating the Arts, brings together artists, studios, and cultural institutions to share concrete examples of what emerges when creativity and technology intersect in unexpected ways. Hosted by Corinne Estrada (Communicating the Arts) and Teresa Retzer (Mesh Festival, Switzerland), the session features presentations from Daniel Iregui (Iregular Studio), Nicolas S. Roy (Dpt.), and filmmaker, activist, and curator Tracy Rector, whose work centers on an unsanctioned digital intervention that brought together seventeen Indigenous artists to reframe the narratives of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

XN Québec will co-present a series of case studies presentations, highlighting the future of immersive technologies. Hosted by Vanessa Costa from TIFF: The Market (Producer, Innovation), New Horizons: What’s Next in Immersive is a series of case study presentations, showcasing the most exciting projects and innovations in the industry. Immersive Iterations: Storytelling Across Platforms, hosted by Josh Goldblum of community conversation experiential design series Futurespaces, features Samantha King (VIVE Arts), Denys Lavigne (OASIS Immersion) and audiovisual artist Line Katcho in a panel exploring how immersive works can be built with distribution and adaptability in mind from the start across domes, headsets, and immersive venues.

Presented with SODEC, 10 years of Atelier Grand Nord: Pushing the Boundaries of XR Creation celebrates a decade of francophone immersive creation with a retrospective and forward-looking conversation moderated by Éloi Champagne (National Film Board of Canada).

MUTEK is also partnering with Ic3y Mag for their event series Listening Room to present an immersive listening session of Jump Source’s long-awaited album Fold, followed by a conversation dissecting the collaborative process behind the album led by Nyshka Chandran from Resident Advisor.

At the multidisciplinary production house DASA, Swiss-French composer and sound artist Noémi Büchi will lead a hands-on masterclass examining how digital tools can serve as compositional, performative, and organizational environments for live electronic music. The day also includes Collective interactivity, a workshop offered by Society for Arts and Technology [SAT] exploring collective interactive practices in immersive environments, taking place within the SAT dome for an enveloping, hands-on experience.