Entangled Spaces: Art, Technology and the Future of Cultural Engagement

Hosted by Teresa Retzer (MESH Festival), this session brings together studios and creators around immersive storytelling and the future of cultural engagement, inviting speakers to share concrete examples of what happens when artists and cultural institutions collide around new technologies. Opened by a five-minute intro from Communicating the Arts founder Corinne Estrada on their upcoming Ottawa edition. The answer, it turns out, has little to do with technology.

Presentations include:

• Sound Is An Invisible Screen

Daniel Iregui (Founder and Creative Director, Iregular) presents SONAR, a proprietary sound projection system that lets different visitors experience personal audio realities within the same space, with no headphones, no intrusive infrastructure. Built on the belief that sound deserves equal footing with visuals in any immersive experience, SONAR responds to multiple visitors simultaneously without overwhelming the shared environment. The presentation draws on deployments at the Canadian War Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum, and closes with a live demonstration.

• Talking to a Dead Man: What We Learned Building an AI Character That Talks Back

Nicolas Roy (President and Executive Creative Director, Dpt.) presents an AI version of Charles McKiernan, the 19th-century Montréal tavern keeper known as Joe Beef, who has held tens of thousands of conversations with visitors at Pointe-à-Callière. Using real logs from the installation, Roy unpacks how a museum can let generative AI improvise as a character without ever improvising the history, and why the hard part isn't the technology, it's the curation behind it.

• Encoded: Change the Story, Change the Future

Tracy Rector (filmmaker, activist and curator, 4th World Media) presents an unsanctioned digital intervention engaging with the permanent collection in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Developed with the media and design lab Amplifier, this Indigenous augmented reality (AR) intervention brings together seventeen Indigenous artists to reframe the narratives of American art, asking which stories are told, which are missing, and how they might be reimagined.

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.