MUTEK/Forum IMG 2019. Art, Technology and Society: Imagining Our Digital Futures

First Forum IMG attendance for me in Montreal. The conference took place in the same time as the Montreal MUTEK edition. It’s not my first MUTEK and this year I decided to take my ticket for the Forum IMG as well, a good decision. A lot of topics on the program which I find very interesting: art, technology and society. I was curious to find more about this community, how this ecosystem is evolving. Having answered to call for project submissions in the past weeks on those topics I was curious as I already wrote: who is creating, why, who has the money, who is funding the projects, who is deciding, so many questions.

The forum is organised as a regular conference, with keynotes, presentations of project, panel discussions, workshops, networking sessions…

First day

A keynote given by Douglas Rushkoff entitled Team Human which I didn’t know because I don’t know much. But a bunch of peculiar point of views and some well thought critics of the tech/capitalist word we are living in.

The next session was following the wave, Bill Poster presented the art of combining subversion and advertising or subversting or brandalism. Basically how to re-gain control of the visual space in the cities usually trusted by advertising. Funny or not the same technology will be use for mass surveillance or to measure customer engagement depending on which side of the line you are. Those projects tend to wake up the people regarding how their attention is controlled, to be less passive regarding the constant visual aggression of our friends from advertising.

Then digital arts in Museum was on stage. Nothing new for me, there is several conferences, events on that topic that I have attended in the past in Europe or US. There is one aspect of how to bring new experiences to the museum with new technologies, you have to had VR in your pitch, another aspect is how to maintain the museum experience outside the museum, the online presence. About the use of technologies in museum my last exciting experience was in Montreal at the MAC last year for the Rafael Lozano Hemmer exhibition.

I was happy to re-connect with the digital dome community while meeting some people of the Montreal planetarium. If you are producing content for an immersive display such as a planetarium you are right in the middle of many technologies and that’s pretty exciting. I really enjoy the MoMar project, again how to hack with taste a space moving too slow. MUTEK had a VR salon where you could experience some of the projects presented during the IMG Forum, the Water Lily obsession was pretty good, simple, poetic, short and very immersive: how to experience the painter universe from his inspiration, atelier to exhibition place.

Second day

I started this day with the panel The Livable City which I could translate by the struggle of wanted to create/re-create links between people in the city. Among the panelists Daily tous les jours had several interesting projects to talk about. Panel moderated by Jasmin Grimm from retune. More than the technologies used in those projects, it’s for me a solution for city to sale spaces and let private companies the role of creating social links. I feel that the organisation of North American cities versus European (because it is what I know the most) produces different interactions between their inhabitants (be aware of my online degree in social urbanism studies). What work in one place may not in another. I often feel that public spaces in cities here in North America are only seen as extension of amusement park… I’m not saying European cities are flawless.

The rest of day was about digital colonialism and algorithms with the panel Whose art is it? Authorship and Agency in Algorithmic Art. The panel was pretty interesting, revealing that AI is (wait for it) a buzz word and not many people understand what it is, both panelists and comments from the audience where constructive. Especially about authorship and using AI in producing art works, the people doing the neural network are not the authors, same as the pencils makers are not the artists, the use of the tools make you one.

Cool workshop on automatic text generation

Then I had the chance to follow a workshop given by one of the previous panelist Helena Nikonole about automatic text generation (together with Natalia Fuchs from artypcical). I love NLP so I was served. For the workshop we used a Google tool called colab which again is an amazing tool, always impressed with what they gave to the community. For that workshop I used the full text of Bel Ami as basis, the goal was to give a word and let your trained system to generate words based on that input. I thought the best to interpret the output of the automatic text generation is to know well the data source and I have read about five to six times this book in the last three to four years. In two hours I was just able to generate text that looks like mumbling but it’s an art work in progress and it’s really fun.

Final day on future of immersive experience also called XR

I wasn’t really convinced with the last day, especially the main track, too much self congratulation and self promotion to be interesting. To me the future of immersive XR appears as mainstream mass media entertainment. Nothing new.