Tag Archives: Mutek

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How You Remind Me

HRT with Zom Zom Illegal and Kay-Fayb, Distorsion Festival, Mario Park, 28 August 2026

Kirby Lees of HRT performs at Mario Park for the 2026 Distorsion Festival. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Very logically, and inexorably, the increase in the power of power heightens the will to destroy it. But there is more: somewhere, it was party to its own destruction.”
—Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism

The approaching silver anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City signifies most visibly, offers the occasion to reevaluate just what was under attack that day, and why.

If it is true that Osama bin Laden and a faction of terrorists called al-Qaeda perpetrated those events, then we might conclude that Western power, symbolized by American economic and sociopolitical dominance, was the target. And the reason for attacking the Twin Towers was essentially envy that the global West possessed this dominance and the global East did not.

But if we allow that there was a suicidal gesture implicit in the felling of the Twin Towers, which their own vertical descent represented, as if incapable of enduring the affront, then we might concede that global economic interdependence was the target, and rather, the West had declared war on itself because a Western-led integrated world economy was nearing perfection.

If it was not “America” and all it stood for that was under attack that day, but instead a much less abstract enemy — world trade — then it is easier to thread together the events of September 11th, 2001, with those acts of self-harm that the current American administration is inflicting in its deliberate yet desperate assaults on America’s international trade partners.

Hraïr Hratchian with Sarah Pagé and Kaitlyn Clark, ÉCHOS XIV, Ateliers Belleville, 21 August 2026

Sarah Pagé performs at Ateliers Belleville for ÉCHOES XIV. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Remember, in the immediate wake of 9/11, all those po-faced Adornoite proclamations that there would be ‘no more triviality’ in American popular culture after the Twin Towers fell?”
—Mark Fisher, “Choose Your Weapons”

Of the pop music albums released on September 11th, 2001, three particularly stand out in my memory: Nickelback’s Silver Side Up; Is This It? by The Strokes; and Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft.

Reading popular culture as a harbinger of catastrophe is a tempting but tenuous proposition, like dream interpretation: there is no way to prove or disprove any available theory. Not to mention, American dreams are nearly too nightmarish to attempt to decode. Still, it is impossible to resist an analysis of concurrent events, for there is no such thing as a meaningless coincidence.

The opening song on Bob Dylan’s album is entitled “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” and begins with the lyrics:

Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee
They’re throwing knives into the tree
Two big bags of dead man’s bones
Got their noses to the grindstones

Dylan’s titular characters are most famously associated with the dramatis personae of Lewis Caroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a story in which Alice enters a mirror world where, among other fantastical incongruities, logic is reversed. The Twin Towers were more than mere reverse images of one another; they embodied replication, reiteration, and automatonlike accumulation — the core logics of late capitalism.

In the traditional English nursery rhyme, Tweedledum and Tweedledee appear as identical yet opposing characters who clash over a broken rattle. Unexpectedly, the childish pair is attacked from above by a “monstrous crow” that frightens and distracts them from their original quarrel.

Was the monstrous crow actually a hijacked jetliner? Are the Twin Towers Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or a nation divided against itself? Did Bob Dylan, America’s honorary poet laureate, somehow portend that the Towers would ultimately befit “two big bags of dead man’s bones?”

Kali Malone with Kara-Lis Coverdale, X/Visions 1, MUTEK Festival, Maison Symphonique, 27 August 2026

Kali Malone performs at Maison Symphonique for MUTEK’s X/Visions 1. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Sameness is not mastered, only approached.”
—K Hole, Youth Mode

Within similarity, subtle forms of variation emerge. Those who cannot remember history, as the adage goes, are condemned to repeat it. But no repetition is an exact duplicate. Duration always introduces surplus deviations.

As well, the commemoration of history continually revises it. Therefore, history’s routine remembrance, rather than guarding against its reprisal, ensures its reiteration. Time is the struggle that churns cream into butter.

Paracetamol Overclock, Diego Behncke, EISODE, 21 August – 1 October 2026

Installation view of Paracetamol Overclock by Diego Behncke at EISODE. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Significant differences in agency arise from the involutions and distributions of relations in code.”
—Adrian Mackenzie, Cutting Code

More than a dozen young people in the spring of 2021 in Calgary, Alberta, suffered from what came to be known colloquially as “TikTok tics” — dramatic and seemingly involuntary physical spasms like swinging arms or head twitches, often accompanied by vocal whoops and chirps.

Over the following 12 months, with which the second year of the Coronavirus pandemic coincided, thousands of teenagers — mostly girls or nonbinary adolescents, though nobody knows why — were treated worldwide for experiencing this strain of sudden physiological explosions. Of these individuals, the overwhelming majority began suffering from functional tic-like behaviours after watching TikTok videos of other teenagers claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome.

The meme is the form of utterance proper to contemporary digital culture. Each digital utterance is enfolded into code and circulates according to binary protocols. Recipients of utterances, however, are not the same as recipients of code. The language of memes, which humans interpret, is conveyed through the language of code, which computers interpret.

It may be through this non-human step of language translation, from binary to nonbinary, that twitches manifest in human beings as glitches manifest in autonomous technologies.

Ida Toninato with Pick a Piper and Barket, Expérience 1, MUTEK Festival, Esplanade Tranquile, 25 August 2026

Ido Toninato performs at Esplanade Tranquille for MUTEK’s Expérience 1. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Man always dies before he is fully born.”
—Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

The notion of living up to one’s potential is an inherently capitalistic idea, although one that is usually coupled with idealism rather than nihilism. The Protestant work ethic which defined American exceptionalism encouraged social subjects to continually strive for improvement. A distortion arose when the object of desire became degradation rather than perfection.

The American ethic in the 21st century is still locked into striving for some measure of improvement. Although what it is improving now is its own demise. The proof of an America in decline is that American exceptionalism extends to a perverse pride in perfecting disgrace. Imagine a conversation between two co-conspirators in a race to the bottom.

“Are we the worst that we can possibly be?” asks one.

“No,” replies the other, “I think we can still be better at being worse.”◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Plush twin teddy bears on display at Sky Fleurs, Palais des congrès de Montréal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Technology of Tradition: in conversation with Caroline Monnet

The contemporary notion of technology is commonly of electronics, mechanics, science. Technology nowadays is considered first and foremost to be efficient, digital, infallible. “Tech” is modern not archaic, big not diminutive, masculine not feminine, binary not polyadic, and ultimately, a colonial utility for capital’s production and accumulation.

But various civilisations have various understandings of what constitutes a technology. The ancient Trypillian culture of present-day Western Ukraine, for instance, decorated eggs with wax and dyes in complex symbolic imagery. Similarly, North American Indigenous knowledge keepers wove and carved technological wisdom into embroidery and artifacts given freely down through generations. For these non-Christian traditions, technology is neither synonymous nor equivalent with commodity.

“It’s interesting,” says the Anishinaabe-French multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet, “to use technology to create a space where a spirit can exist.”

Monnet gives an artist talk on 26 August 2026 around her most recent film, called Pidikwe, as part of MUTEK Montreal’s discourse forum. Yet, she is a curious choice for a festival that centres on high technology, given that Monnet’s practice is explicitly low-tech — at least in terms of current definitions.

Monnet does not operate in the world of augmented reality or Artificial Intelligence. As a filmmaker, she embraces analogue celluloid. Combinations of synthetic and organic materials characterize her visual art. Nonetheless, Monnet succeeds in transforming those comparatively traditional media into a poetic form of futurity. “Using technology to evoke spirits is different from what we might expect,” she tells me.

At only 41, Caroline Monnet has attained admirable accolades in both the cinematic and contemporary art scenes. She has been nominated twice at the Canadian Screen Awards; she is a recipient of the prestigious Prix Pierre-Ayot; in 2023, she was named Compagne des arts et des lettres du Québec; and she is a finalist in this year’s Sobey’s Arts Award, for which she was also shortlisted in 2020.

Her works have been exhibited at the Musée d’art contemporain and the National Gallery of Canada, and she was the subject of a solo show entitled Ninga Mìnèh, meaning “promise” in Anishinaabemowin, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2021. The title was apt, given Monnet’s prodigious potential and her wide array of achievements.

“Every medium is a way to grow my practice as an artist and as a person. I like to branch out into areas I haven’t explored before. But I think the themes and curiosity and the messages I want to convey remain the same,” Monnet explains. “It’s the same artist behind all the artworks.”

Through assorted media, Monnet’s work is always rooted in bringing awareness and education around Indigenous lived realities. But it is not solely of interest or importance to First Nations, Inuit, or Métis audiences. “I’m hoping to touch people of all backgrounds on a more universal level,” says Monnet. “We all share a common space, which is the earth. We all have a common responsibility for generations to come. These are universal concepts that I’m trying to bring into the work. It’s about creating an emotional space for people to live their own experience.”

Caroline Monnet, Man-made Land, 2025, ICA Boston Installation view. Photographed by Mel Taing.

Hailing originally from the Outaouais region of Quebec, Monnet is the daughter of a French father and an Anishinaabe mother. She came of age in a small village in Brittany where she first had an emotional encounter with cinema.

“When I was 12 years old, I saw Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance by Alanis Obomsawin,” Monnet recalls, “and that was kind of when it clicked in my mind. Alanis was there to present the film. I saw Indigenous people for the first time onscreen. And I also realized the power of media for education and empowerment.”

She initially resolved to pursue journalism, “to pick up a camera and tell stories,” she says, working for a short time at Radio-Canada and other T.V. production companies. But Monnet realized that she was drawn more to experimental filmmaking, creating video installations, and later, visual arts.

“One experience leads to another experience. It’s a snowball effect,” Monnet observes, “it’s not planned. I didn’t have a grandiose idea of what I wanted to do in life. It happened through exploration and experimentation — and opportunities. You’ve got to trust the process.”

Every artist has their own unique path, and Monnet’s quickly exposed an exploration of habitat, territory, and the impact that we as human beings have upon our environment. She frequently incorporates construction materials into her works to demonstrate how the economic wealth of western societies is made through the exploitation of natural resources.

“There are habitats in the land that we occupy, the homes that we live in,” says Monnet. “But also, there are habitats that are around us that we don’t really see, or that we’ve lost our capacities to see and have gratitude for.”

These habitats will be the subject of a new exhibition at Galerie Blouin | Division, opening 10 September. “It’s a big show,” she tells me. “I’ve been working very hard on that show all summer.”

Caroline Monnet, Papakinede, 2024, ceramic, cement, grout, wood. 43 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 35 in. Photographed by Nik Massey.

Monnet currently employs eight interns in her studio who work as we speak to complete the exhibition on schedule. “That’s not something to take for granted,” she says. “As an artist, to be able to have a studio, to have a team working with me, these are real things that make a huge difference.” And although Montreal has endured jumps in cost of living and the evaporation of affordable ateliers, Monnet praises Mooniyang as her beloved home base.

“It’s big enough to have the qualities of a major city, but also small enough to feel like a village. I wouldn’t be able to live in a city like New York,” she admits. “Even though it’s very exhilarating, and there is access to so much culture there, on a daily basis, you need to sustain as an artist. You need to focus, and sleep, and rest. You have to be in a place where what is surrounding the practice is healthy and welcoming. I think Montreal is a pretty special place.”

Though Monnet sees an alarming trend emerging everywhere with the advent of A.I. One of technology’s most revealing features is that it always reflects the culture from which it emerged. And there is no denying that Artificial Intelligence is a product of an accelerationist and hyper-capitalist ethos.

Monnet frets for future generations. “To think that maybe A.I. is going to be the end of us because we’ll have no drinking water in a couple of years, for me, that’s the really scary part,” she says. “There’s a real lack of responsibility and it frustrates me. And from a creative standpoint, also. It will never be able to replace us, really. But it’s just taking away from the creativity of artists. I think it’s used in a very bad way. It’s kind of worrisome that people are not thinking for themselves as much anymore. Art is about fighting ignorance.”

Still, of all the arcane technologies that demand our attention and innovation today, spirituality may be the most urgent. “I do believe that I’m able to bring spirituality and spirit into the work,” Monnet claims.

“I think that the spirit is coming from human interaction and energy. In the studio I always tell my assistants that I want good thoughts to travel through their hands — from mind to hands. That’s something that I value very much for myself when I’m weaving or working on something with my hands. We have such a responsibility when we put artwork into the world. For people to see them and live with them in their homes, it has to be filled with good intentions.”

Monnet pauses momentarily.

“Maybe,” she adds, “machines don’t have the intention part.”◼︎

Caroline Monnet speaks at MUTEK Forum on 26 August 2026. Her forthcoming solo exhibition runs 10 September – 6 November at Galerie Blouin | Division, 2020 Rue William.

Cover image: Caroline Monnet photographed by Eva Maude.

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Simulations

Automatisme, Mirage Centers

Clickable screenshot of Automatisme’s Mirage Centers, 2026.

The screenwriter Bob Gale put speculation to rest in 2015 when he revealed to The Daily Beast that Biff Tannen’s character in Back to the Future II was indeed based upon Donald Trump.

What is uncanny about this revelation is that that film, which predicted the nightmarish rise of a vulgar and dystopian strain of hyper-capitalism, was released in 1989, a full 25 years before Trump would seek election for president of the United States.

Donald Trump in easily the most fan fiction-inspired story of the summer was widely reported last week to have used a catering container to spirit himself from Air Force One and onto an unmarked military jet to leave the NATO summit in Turkey on 8 July. The story seemed tailor made for well-placed jabs from late-night talk show hosts. Still, Trump is impervious to satire because the truth in Trump’s case is invariably stranger than fiction.

Subterfuge, decoys, and body doubles are frequent themes of conspiracy theorists on all sides of the political spectrum. Social media sleuths following a CNBC interview with Joe Biden on 5 December 2019 claimed to detect a “skin tone mismatch” between the then-president’s face and neck, leading to suspicions that the individual in question was a ringer in a rubber mask. And theories that body doubles often replaced Melania Trump at public events date back to 2017. Trump himself decried these theories as “fake news,” one of his favourite deflections.

Fake news in the modern broadcast media age might have originated on 30 October 1938 with Orson Welles’s notorious CBS radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which sparked widespread panic that a Martian invasion was actually taking place on a farm near Grovers Mill, New Jersey. At that time, Welles, among America’s busier celebrities, was also reputed to have hired ambulances to rush him both swiftly and anonymously between gigs in New York City.

Is this where Trump got the catering cart idea? God forbid anyone interfere with the president’s dessert.

Though of all the celebrity doppelgangers that Donald Trump resembles, Andy Kaufman’s alter ego, Tony Clifton, the foul-mouthed crooner and troll extraordinaire, fits the bill better than real-life Orson Welles or fictional Biff Tannen. Clifton, with his mismatched skin tones between jowl and jaw, seems in retrospect like the ultimate Trump prototype, the matinee villain that audiences jeer and boo and love to hate, and yet, for whom their appetite appears insatiable.

MUTEK 27 launch, Société des arts technologiques, 11 August 2026

Alain Mongeau introduces the 27th edition of MUTEK at the SAT. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Simulation is one of the military’s most effective and frequently used forms of training. Think of the 1983 film WarGames, which depicts a computer hacker, portrayed by Matthew Broderick, who accidentally gains access to a supercomputer programmed to continuously run war simulations against the former Soviet Union. Broderick’s character, David Lightman, believes that “Global Thermonuclear War” is only a video game, until he realizes that World War III is about to become a reality.

The film is not just a simulation; it is a simulation of a simulation, twice removing the narrative from the order of the real. In other words, WarGames is not even a real simulation.

Nonetheless, the film was credited by some of the world’s top computer scientists as a big inspiration. Sergey Brin told the audience at a Google-sponsored 25th anniversary screening in 2008 that WarGames was the “key movie” of the generation that pioneered computing.

WarGames is an instance of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “precession of simulacra,” where a simulation of a simulation paradoxically produces the reality — where the map effectively manufactures and tatters the territory.

L’OSM à l’Esplanade du Parc Olympique, 12 August 2026

Maestro Rafael Payare conducts the OSM at Parc Olympique. Antoine Saito for Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

In the concluding season of Lars von Trier’s cult miniseries The Kingdom, doppelgangers of Bulder and Karen manifest spontaneously to thwart their efforts to return all of the hospital’s troubled spirits to their rightful resting place. Where the real Bulder and Karen constantly lumber around the Rigshospitalet looking forlorn and anxious, their malevolent counterparts have permanent grins pasted upon their faces, happy in their work transforming angels into demons, good into evil. Willem Dafoe’s Grand Duc character, too, demonstrates the pure joy of performing wickedness.

Like its closest T.V. relative, Twin Peaks, The Kingdom delights in representing evil as an inversion of virtue. Important symbols appear upside down, maps and diagrams are reversed, and doppelgangers are not merely simulations but rather mirror images of their referent selves.

Naomi Klein in her 2023 book Doppelganger describes in exhaustive detail her own experience tumbling into what she terms the “Mirror World,” wrestling with “Other Naomi,” the conservative social commentator Naomi Wolf, and coming to grips with the doubling and multiplying selves that we actively create every day through online personas, social media accounts, avatars, icons, and other digital incarnations. Klein paints a stark portrait of the unheimlich in which neither mirrored identity is objectively authentic.

“The point is,” Klein writes, “that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality — we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.”

Nightshift, Blouin | Division, 31 July — 29 August 2026

Installation view of a work by Harrison Pearce at Galerie Blouin | Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something.”
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

It is not the presence but rather the absence of a double self that now evokes the eerie sense. We expect to see ourselves reflected in media — it’s simply called “representation.” If we are not represented, our very existence is called into question, like a ghost that fails to see its own countenance reflected in the mirror.

Ilisattaugialik: Something That Needs to be Learned, La Guilde, 30 July ­— 12 September 2026

Thomas Whiteley, The Eternal Battle Between Dog and Raven, 17/20, 2026, woodcut print on Japanese paper, 16″ x 27″. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Local natures are thrown out of joint not by monsters but by disequilibria…”
—Lorraine Daston, Against Nature

It is difficult for us not to interpret the changing climate — the devastating wildfires and floods that characterize a warming planet — as nature’s revenge. And yet this posits humans in opposition to nature, the mirror-image artifice to some idealized notion of a natural order.

In fact, there is nothing, whether synthetic or organic, that is unnatural. The sooner that we recognize ourselves as an integral part of nature, the sooner we will make peace with our simulated selves.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Thomas Whiteley, Uirniik 3/5 (detail) 2025, woodcut print on Japanese paper, 48″ x 168″. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Practically Magic: in conversation with Myriam Bleau

“What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.”
—Nikola Tesla

The visual artist and Montreal-based musician Myriam Bleau, stone-faced until this moment, grins mischievously, lighting up the screen of a Zoom call from Barcelona. She is talking about the gamut between science and magic and recalls an aphorism that she cannot quite properly attribute.

“Don’t quote me on this because I can’t remember who said it, but it’s something like, if you see cool technology for the first time,” she paraphrases, “it feels like magic.”

Tech companies, our new Gods in the 21st century, have leaned heavily upon this rhetoric. When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone at the MacWorld conference on 9 January 2007, he proclaimed that the device “works like magic.” The Fortune magazine contributor Shawn Tully in 2025 coined the phrase “Musk Magic Premium” to explain why that particular billionaire’s valuation is based more upon future speculation than current performance.

Truly, so much innovation is entwined nowadays with magical mythology — which is overtly masculine, the purview of the visionary bro-genius. But Bleau’s work eviscerates all of this narcissistic machismo.

“A lot of people don’t know because I don’t advertise it,” she declares, “but I’m very radical, politically. I’m always trying to trace a line between a lot of different thoughts that I have about technology. And I’ve become such a radical feminist over the years. I really look for integrity in the work that I do. Not to sell away what’s really important. That to me is political.”

A DJ performing on stage with vibrant laser lights projecting the word 'hypmbioty' above.
“There was always a tech development part to my projects.” Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

Myriam Bleau will inaugurate Montreal’s traditional Tech Spring season this Friday with a double bill performance alongside Alva Noto, co-presented by MUTEK and the Society for Arts and Technology. Entitled Hypermobility, the show deploys lasers that her electronic sounds trigger to create shapes and words which are projected overhead in sync with the music.

“Don’t worry,” Bleau says reassuringly, “a few years ago, I did a laser safety officer course. A lot of people are scared of lasers, but I don’t scan the audience. It’s really rare that there’s any problems happening.”

Hypermobility, Bleau informs me, is more an audio-visually formalist study than a laser lightshow spectacle. “It’s meant to feel like you visualize the sound,” she says. “The way that I do it is really angular. It’s kind of like a sculpting exercise for me. I always try to approach it like an étude. Not that I always manage to have that purity of intention. But that’s what I’m looking for.”

The concept behind Hypermobility probes the politics inherent in the circulation of bodies for tourism and trade. A hierarchy exists to the perceived necessity of certain individuals to move around the globe, and it seldom favours artists.

“Right now, the arts are trying to push against travelling,” Bleau laments.

“There is this push towards being environmentally friendly, which is nice in theory. Now, festivals in Europe are asking me to prove that I have a tour around that date because they don’t want to encourage people just going for one show. But sometimes I need to survive by going to do that one show. There’s this whole system of guilt-tripping people. In theory, it is a lot of carbon footprint when I travel. But there are a lot of other people who don’t actually need to travel, and artists physically need to. So, the question of hypermobility has many different aspects to it.”

A DJ performing on stage with vibrant blue and purple laser lights projecting from the back.
“The literature aspect of it was a part of the conceptual part of my project.” Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

Bleau, 38, grew up in Montreal with a distinct inkling that she would pursue a creative path.

“From a very young age, I wanted to do music,” she recalls. “I also studied literature, so the literature aspect of it was a part of the conceptual part of my project. At first I thought I was going to be more of a musician. I studied jazz guitar as an undergrad. I was into weird free jazz experimental stuff. Then I did my master’s in electroacoustics at Université de Montréal, and then I got more into electronics. But I don’t operate in academia,” she says. “I’m a freelance artist.”

Solidarity with the DIY movement has served as a guiding principle to Bleau, who recently collaborated with the interdisciplinary dance choreographer Nien Tzu Weng, and is in Barcelona to work with Mónica Rekić, an artist who makes miniature robots and handmade electronics, some of which are visible on the Zoom call just over Bleau’s shoulder.

“I have a group of friends that do similar things and I feel like we inspire each other,” Bleau says. “I guess it’s most of the people who are doing weird audiovisual performance things.”

The prosumer turn in the early 2000s ushered in a groundbreaking new era where it became more accessible to incorporate novel technologies in the arts.

“There was always a tech development part to my projects,” Bleau explains.

“But now, what’s happening with technology? Everything is about A.I. The technology is more complicated and the resources that you need to feel like you’re doing anything innovative is just unattainable. So, I think around the pandemic, I shifted towards not wanting my projects to feel innovative, and more towards being critical of technology. I use technology in a subversive way, and that subversion is also feminist. It brings the attention away from the tech and more toward what it represents, socially.”

The social construction of technology is the theory that, for Bleau, perforates the tech-bro bubble. But she is less interested in theory than practice, teasing out corporeal liveness from within the electronic pre-programming.

“In my performances, I kind of embrace the glitch everywhere,” Bleau says. “It’s always something that interests me. But I don’t exploit the glitch of the machines. I am inspired in a very literary way. I draw words, and for me, it’s more about the visual energy. The words are glitching out during different letters, and you can see subliminal words in what is written. And what is written is political.”

The political allegories implicit in Bleau’s work may not be immediately discernible. But they are alive and present in each and every gesture, pixel, and waveform.

“I like using metaphors,” she tells me. “I try to have all these little things that connect together. Sometimes I will sneak in little messages. But I still want the work to operate as a work of art. I don’t want the political message or the agenda to be what makes it a great piece.”

For Bleau, it seems that demystifying the magic around performing with technology — making God physical — is paramount to transporting tech back down to earth. There is no product launch-style hyperbolic hype to Bleau’s pieces, no sleight of hand intended to cast a spell upon her audience.

“Do we need to create a sense of authenticity about what we’re actually doing?” Bleau asks rhetorically.

“I try to create this contract where you understand what’s going on. And I’m not going to mess up this contract. You can always see very clearly what’s going on. That’s how I approach my projects these days.”◼︎

Myriam Bleau performs with Alva Noto 8 May 2026 at Espace SAT, 1201 Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

Cover image: Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Sweet Emotion: in conversation with Erin Gee

Erin Gee is overflowing with enthusiasm.

The artist, electroacoustic musician, and academic has invited me around on a swelteringly steamy summer afternoon to her relatively shaded backyard to tell me over a cool beverage about her work, particularly a forthcoming performance, entitled Affect Flow, which Gee and collaborators — both real and robotic — will present at this year’s Mutek festival in August.

“I’m so full of things to talk about right now,” Gee exclaims, before quickly doubling back. “I’ll have to turn off the academia and turn up the passion.”

Immediately, Gee third-guesses herself: “Maybe they’re married sometimes.”

Gee speaks in a characteristically deliberate scholarly pitch, punctuated incongruously with folksy snort-laughs that betray her quirky intelligence and wit. Gee is currently finishing a doctorate in composition et création sonore at Université de Montréal’s Music department, having relocated from Saskatchewan years ago to complete an MFA at Concordia and steep herself in this city’s cultural scenes.

“I’ve been productive artistically, but in the meantime, I’m getting a doctorate,” Gee chuckles. “It’s something that has really spurred my creativity and got me going. I’m not much of a big city girl; I was just passionate about learning to work with robotics.”

Gee’s robotic passions were rewarded after a fortuitous meeting in Sydney, Australia, with the neurophysiologist Vaughan Macefield, a researcher who creates robotic biofeedback sensors that measure human factors like heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, blood pressure, and neural activity.

Gee recalls that Macefield “just kind of said, ‘I don’t know, I think my work is fascinating, and it would be cool to see what an artist could do with it.’” She then had “a flash, imagining a piano that you could play with these things,” and embarked upon a multiyear research creation project to design biosensing robots that behaved something like a distributed wind chime.

“It was in a diatonic scale,” Gee explains of that work, “and basically, little hammers would strike little bells, and the parameters from an emotional person would control musical parameters like speed, timbre, the mode that the sound was playing in, the density of the notes. So you would end up with this abstract interior portrait of people.”

Though the musical product was not as simple as, say, hearing saccharine strings coming from a sad subject, or mouth harps and slide whistles emitting from someone more cheerful.

“When I first started making this work,” Gee divulges, “I really thought I could have some Holy Grail of interior musical emotional being. What I instead learned was that everyone’s interior world is really different. Even if, to a certain degree, Hollywood has already imprinted upon us what happiness and sadness sound like, what it feels like is totally different inside all of us. Anger, fear, surprise — these manifest physiologically very differently in us depending on how we were raised. This plays into gender, class, trauma — all kinds of things. So I was a bit bummed out because it’s really common for us to expect technology to reveal nature’s secrets. And you open up the Black Box and discover it’s Black Boxes all the way down.”

Gee later transferred her robotic technology into portable synthesizers, called Biosynths, and began working with a choir of young kids to make music. “I told myself, you just made a fleet of robots, you can work with children,” she laughs.

Gee soon discovered that the aesthetics of the technology were equally important to functionality in shaping its user’s attitudes. “You almost have to think of it as a collaboration when you’re working with robotics as much as with humans,” Gee says. “It’s a very different game than just making the device and making it work. And so the kids, unfortunately, were probably my toughest critics, but also my first customers. I learned a lot from them and hopefully they learned a lot from me.”

Affect Flow, Gee’s forthcoming Mutek performance, combines her user-friendly biosensing robotic technologies with the more avant-garde, and adult, practice of autonomous sensory meridian response — commonly abbreviated as ASMR — into something Gee calls ‘ASMRtronica.’

ASMR consists primarily of exceedingly sensuous and lushly recorded sounds like whispering, clicking, crunching, pouring liquids, and the like. Its objective is to produce the tingling sensation associated with pleasurable affective experience — if not pleasurable, then sensorially authentic.

And herein lies the paradoxical rub: its effects may decidedly be real, but ASMR is entirely synthetic: “ASMR is this hyper intimate, hyper personal, but really artificial practice of doing these gestures,” Gee explains.

“It’s closely related to hypnosis, but faux hypnosis. It combines hypnosis with social media feeds. It’s using these emotional hacks to push your body’s buttons. And I realized that this was the opposite of what I was trying to do: Instead of using emotions to push the mechanical buttons, now we are using emotions and gestures to push our physiological buttons. For me, ASMR became like this hinge. I had to get into it and understand it more, to inhabit this space in a way I knew I could as an artist.”

Under Gee’s direction, Affect Flow features an ensemble wearing biofeedback sensors corresponding to hardware synthesizers. “I’ll have ten people that make this ambient wash of sound,” she describes, “or there might be these brief moments when everybody is physiologically synced. So the audience can tune in or tune out of that perception of their bodies. People will experience at first a very polished ASMRtronica roleplay. And then,” Gee snorts, “it’s going to get a bit weird.”

“I’ll be leading everyone in emotional meditations that will mess with you a little. If you want. What I like about this is, you can choose. It’s all about consent. You can go on a journey with me, or just watch it. No one’s even going to know. The people in the biosensors — I call them ‘surrogates’ — because it’s through their bodies that you’ll get an overall portrait of the mood in the room.”

Again, Gee guffaws: “Our bodies are talking, you know?”◼︎

Erin Gee, photographed for NicheMTL with Pastel and Camélia, performs 24 August 2023 as part of Mutek’s Play 1 programme.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Use Your Illusion: in conversation with Joni Void

Jean Néant — who records and performs as Joni Void — and I have just received a guided tour of the Museum of Illusions, a new, social media meme-ready attraction in Old Montreal, and are sat now upon a park bench on Rue le Royer, the block-long pedestrian strip that serves as a sort of replica of somewhere in France.

It’s an abundance of touristic activity.

But it is not like France, Néant tells me, hailing from that country. It is no less spectacular. But it is very much like Montreal, the extraordinary international city that Néant chose as his creative home.

Montreal’s DIY scene drew Néant out from being a bedroom producer in the late aughts to performing solo onstage; releasing recordings via the revered Constellation Records label, the most recent of which is entitled Everyday Is The Song; collaborating with the likes of Mardi Spaghetti, the city’s improvised music series, and experimental harpist Sarah Pagé; and mounting his own events, first at the now-defunct loft space called La Plante, where Néant lived for two years, and since 2018 under the aegis Everyday Ago.

“When I was in France,” says Néant, “I was a bedroom producer never thinking I would play live. I thought there was no point because I was just on my laptop. The idea of being a part of a scene and a community for me was online. But moving to Montreal and going to the Plante and all these DIY venues and house shows, all these artists were just playing with computers onstage and it wasn’t an issue. The music was good and people were having a blast.”

Joni Void is performing a handful of live dates in Montreal before embarking on a tour of Japan in July. The trip was originally slated for 2020 but was cancelled, as Néant quips, “for reasons that might be apparent. So here we are, three years later.”

Following the fallout from the pandemic, Néant is looking forward to returning to Japan, where they toured in 2019. “I never had a trip that went so easy and smooth,” Néant says of that experience. “All the acts we played with were next-level. I’m very lucky.”

“I was a bedroom producer never thinking I would play live.” Louise Callier for NicheMTL

Néant became a resident at La Plante in 2015 and shortly thereafter met a group of likeminded people that formed around a love of avant-garde, experimental music. “I just kind of moved in,” says Néant, “and my friends put together a show that had Sarah Pagé and Markus Floats, who would later release on Constellation.”

It was at this event that Néant conceived of collaborating with Pagé as the duo known now as Page Vide. Néant and Pagé hit it off immediately — “especially” deadpans Néant, “when I helped her carry her harp down the narrow stairs of La Plante. Goddamn, that was a challenge. That was like foreshadowing. Like, wow I will be doing that a lot. That harp knows me now.”

Page Vide are currently working on their first album, Néant says, having finished three tracks, with six more in the works. The duo performs at Suoni per il popolo on June 23rd and at Mutek on August 27th. The autodidact Néant couldn’t be more of a foil for Pagé, a classically trained and supremely disciplined instrumentalist who visits Japan for months at a time for Koto lessons. “I’m as self-taught as you can be,” he proclaims.

Néant began making music in his mid-teens after discovering GarageBand on the family computer, and downloading the stems that more and more artists were making available to encourage engagement with their audience.

“My friends were making mashups,” Néant recalls. “Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails at the time were allowing their multitracks to be remixed. They had their songs online and you could just download the tracks and create your own remixes.”

This participatory activity actually encouraged an entire generation, including Néant, to turn their parents’ bureaucratic, number crunching machines into makeshift music studios.

Néant launched a project called Johnny Ripper, sampling, distorting, and reconstructing snippets of popular songs into psychedelic sonic collage existing somewhere between Girl Talk and Tim Hecker’s Radio Amor. Johnny Ripper caught the ear of Constellation, which encouraged him to derive less and produce more: “I do have a singular style but it acknowledges its sources.”

“I call my music ‘cinema-tek / camera-tronica’ which is not a genre but a way of explaining that I make cinematic electronic music.” Louise Callier for NicheMTL

Néant confesses that he endured an identity crisis and found inspiration in the work of Delia Derbyshire, diving deeply into her music and interviews.

“It’s all this magnetic tape that she would cut up and pitch all these things that you do with a click now on a computer,” says Néant. “To feel like that’s the way she was thinking of sound and music and all that is the way I make music. I make music like I would use a camera, basically. I call my music ‘cinema-tek / camera-tronica’ which is not a genre but a way of explaining that I make cinematic electronic music. It’s made through an intense editing process.”

Everyday Is The Song reveals a montage-like structure — as does Néant’s discussion, jump cutting at times across subjects that seem unrelated but eventually come around. We talk about Néant’s love of optical illusions, “Mise en abyme” being the title of Joni Void’s 2019 album. We talk about how the pandemic reshaped Montreal’s more niche scenes and their slow but steady return. “I’m seeing more events with ‘DM for address,’” Néant notes. “I don’t want to be like ‘nature is healing,’ but there’s definitely a new circuit that is forming.”

It is a beautiful late spring day and a chorus of birds nestles into a nearby bush, twittering up a cacophony of bright birdsong. “My favourite birds are crows,” Néant suddenly declares.

“There’s a park in Japan where there’s a shitload of crows and I always figured I would go one day with a lot of coins, and a lot of food, just be friends with all the crows in the park, and if ever I have issues in life, I’d just have my army of crows.”◼︎

Everyday Is The Song is released via Constellation Records

Jean Néant photographed at the Montreal Museum of Illusions by Louise Callier for NicheMTL

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