Quebec digital arts export themselves to MUTEK Tokyo

After Barcelona in April, Buenos Aires in September and Mexico City in November, the seventh edition of MUTEK Japan, taking place from December 7 to 11, will welcome a selection of Quebec and Canadian artists to conclude a festive and unifying year throughout our network.

With the support of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the Délégation générale du Québec à Tokyo, no less than fifteen actors from the Quebec cultural milieu will take part in this edition, between performances and professional meetings:

Among the artistic figures, all or almost all of them have passed through MUTEK Montréal in the past few years before joining the Tokyo program. This is the case for laced, who performs alongside her partner LCL_Stream, on the occasion of their first audiovisual collaboration for MUTEK.JP x WOMB. This same night, Priori will make his Japanese premiere with a live performance that promises to be a highlight of the program.

The Play 1 program, which explores the relationship between audiovisual works and experimentation with artificial intelligence, is an opportunity for Montreal Life Support & Woulg to present Empty Vessels, an immersive audiovisual installation that saw its world premiere at MUTEK Montreal in 2021. During this same edition, Myriam Bleau unveiled Unsculpt, an audiovisual production mixing hybrid electronic music and visuals from generative processes, a performance she will reprise for MUTEK JP.

Play 2 focuses on audiovisual performances transcending physical and virtual media. On this occasion, Myriam Boucher will present Littoral, a piece combining sculptural objects, sound and light, while France Jobin & Markus Heckmann will perform Entanglement, a work inspired by entanglement in quantum physics and quantum field theory, which is one of the three audiovisual performances transposed into a VR work for the Immersive Collection project.

This seventh edition is an opportunity to develop even closer links between artists, notably through three international collaborations:

VJ BUNBUN & KOPY: The Montréal-based VJ is on visual duty during the performance of musician Yuko Kureyama, aka KOPY, for a singular encounter between two universes that seem so removed from one another.

Sakura Tsuruta & Myriam Boucher: The Japanese producer, whose dark and ethereal sound combinations conquered MUTEK Montreal in 2020, joins forces with Quebec visual artist Myriam Boucher.

Pheek & Manami Sakamoto present Terra, a collaborative performance that explores the nature of beauty through the expression of fractal randomness and abstract happenings, focusing on the diverse contrasts between the origins of nature, human emotions and the destruction and regeneration caused by technological evolution.

For the last Canadian-Japanese collaboration, we present MUTEK Soundsystem, the merging of two members of the MUTEK teams, Vincent Lemieux & Koki, vibrating the 4th floor of WOMB.

Find the whole program

With the support of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the Délégation générale du Québec à Tokyo, no less than fifteen actors from the Quebec cultural milieu will take part in this edition, between performances and professional meetings:

On this occasion, Alain Mongeau, founder and co-director of MUTEK Montreal, will share his vision of the structure's 25th anniversary, and Lola Baraldi, production manager of the Immersive Collection, will present this ambitious project from the other side of the globe with artists France Jobin and Markus Heckmann.

Two members of the Society for Arts and Technology will also speak: Mourad Bennacer on a panel exploring the latest developments in the XR continuum and Jenny Thibault, who along with two other Canadian expatriates Melissa Weigel and Paul Boyland, will participate in a conversation entitled De-borderizing digital creativity: Cross-pollination between business, research, and artistic practice.

This 7th edition of MUTEK.JP is a project commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, "2022 Strategic Project to Create Culture and the Arts"

Photographic credits in chronological order:
Entanglement, France Jobin & Markus Heckmann | MUTEK Montréal 2021 | © Bruno Destombes
Empty Vessels, Montréal Life Support & Woulg | MUTEK Montréal 2021 | © Myriam Ménard
Entanglement, France Jobin & Markus Heckmann | MUTEK Montréal 2021 | © Bruno Destombes