Le Québec, une longueur d'avance en art numérique

Montreal has a deep bench of studios doing serious international work. They’ll range from household names like Moment Factory to the many doing it with a fraction of the spotlight. Silent Partners Studio designs stagecraft for Katy Perry, David Byrne, and Florence + The Machine tours, and they do it all from this city. Ottomata recently won awards for a large-scale public fountain built with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Quebec's digital creativity is a quiet export economy that’s celebrated in the places it ships to, but can be oddly easy to miss from day to day at home. It’s there, but almost unassumingly humming in the background.

Once a year, though, the world comes to it. MUTEK, one of the digital creative scene’s most important international showcases, happens here. This year, its Market component will bring 150 curators, institutions, and digital art programmers, from Tokyo to Tasmania, to meet the city's studios on their home turf.

These studios are showcased both in the Village Numérique and throughout the MUTEK Forum, where their work is featured through talks, project presentations, and case studies from August 26–28 at Édifice Wilder. This local programming sits alongside a broader international showcase of leading trends and projects in the digital art industry, offering a rare opportunity to see Quebec's creative technology sector in direct conversation with its global counterparts.

Ask the founder of the digital art studio Iregular Daniel Iregui what MUTEK means to his studio, and he'll tell you it's the one place in the world where a brand-new idea can meet its audience before the glue is fully dry. "We premiere something at MUTEK, and buyers from around the world come, see it, and hire us," says Iregui. "Not a lot of people have that. We couldn't take that risk in Tokyo." That's the strange privilege of making digital art in Montreal.

Ahead of the festival, we sat down with four studios from that bench—an AI experimentalist, a public-space veteran, a design-school outlier, and an Indigenous game studio—to figure out what's driving this city's momentum.

The inception point of Quebec’s digital creativity

"Cirque du Soleil was the nuclear bomb," Iregui says. "It made this city completely transform."

At its peak, the Cirque was selling more tickets than any other event in the world, simultaneously running seven shows in Vegas, and pulling multimedia and technical talent into Montreal by the planeload. When contracts ended, those people started studios. Hamie Robitaille, co-founder and creative director of TRANSVERSAL, puts it the way a friend once put it to her: "We're all kids of the Cirque."

Nicolas S. Roy, CEO of Dpt., adds the institutional layer to the story. His studio has been at this for 19 years, and he credits the National Film Board's interactive studio—launched around 2009, shuttered in 2024—with legitimizing the whole field.

"They poured public money into these types of projects, allowed studios to take risks, to make projects that weren't commercial," he says. "That's a big part of what helped us become who we are." Add the Canada Media Fund, SODEC, the tax credits that filled the city with video game talent, university programs like Concordia's computation arts, and a culture Roy describes as a mix of North American business sense and a "poetic, romantic European side," and you get a vibrant ecosystem.

Beyond definition—for now

What those studios make creatively is harder to summarize. At Dpt., the current fascination is AI—not as a production shortcut, but as what Roy calls an artisitic medium. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, the studio trained a model on the museum's open-access collection; kids arrange paper and craft supplies on a table, and the system generates artworks inspired by what's hanging on the walls.

"You're not prompting," Roy says. "You're interacting with it through the physical world, and it's generating something new that you're not really controlling." He's equally clear on what he steers clients away from: wanting VR or AI for the sake of novelty. "Starting with the technology is a recipe for something that's not going to be terribly interesting."

Iregular, 16 years and some 50 works in, builds interactive installations for public space such as CONTROL NO CONTROL, a cube-shaped social experiment piece which reacts to every touch and movement on its surface. After Adobe killed Flash and wiped out years of his tools overnight ("the Flash trauma," he calls it), Iregui swore off depending on anyone else's software and built the studio's own tracking system from scratch. The philosophy hasn't changed since: "We deliver unfinished projects that are finished through people’s interaction with them." For MUTEK, the studio is bringing back one of its most pointed works yet—a 12-metre wall of eyes, harvested from the faces of the people standing in front of it, abstracted until you realize the thing watching you is you.

"Depending on your stance on privacy, on surveillance, you're going to feel other things," Iregui says. "We're looking forward to hearing how people behave in front of it."

TRANSVERSAL, meanwhile, comes at interactivity from design. Robitaille and her co-founder, Ganesh Baron Aloir, both with degrees in graphic design, a rarity in a field dominated by theatre and interactive media backgrounds. Their public works evolve and hide Easter eggs, rewarding people curious enough to come back. At the Village Numérique, they're showing Parallèles, an installation built on interactive light batons the studio originally developed so a dancer could control sound and projections in real time—a piece that premiered at MUTEK in 2021 before being re-engineered to survive outdoors, unsupervised.

Robitaille is candid about what the work is up against at home: budgets that are a fraction of what international clients spend, and a market that still needs convincing of its worth. Having come up through advertising, she knows exactly how the province's marketing world hears the word her studio's field is built on. "People call us to make websites," she says. "The term 'experiential' in Quebec is just turning roulettes and winning a prize"—a spin-to-win feature at a brand activation, not a public installation that responds to your body in real time. Closing that gap is half the job, while the other is constraints. However, having less money means the studios here have gotten very good at doing more with it.

Then there's Revital Software, proof that Montreal's digital arts ecosystem is socially rooted in ways the showreels don't always capture. Game designer Kahentawaks Tiewishaw traces her path to a 2008 Skins workshop at the Kahnawake Survival School, where she learned that the games she was playing at home were something she could make her own. Today her indie studio, co-founded with her sister, Wennekerakon Tiewishaw, and a college friend, Frederyk Kowalczyk, builds Indigenous language-learning video games in a country with more than 70 endangered Indigenous languages.

Every translation is traceable to specific speakers from specific communities, dialect by dialect. A game, she says, "can reach people when they're available to learn"—at home, unselfconscious, free of the social pressure of a classroom where everyone arrives with different levels of fluency and different family histories with the language. At the Market, she's hoping to meet Indigenous communities from other parts of the world who want to localize Revital's games or start studios of their own.

Niche but not

For all the international traction, recognition at home remains a strange, lopsided thing. Roy points out that a Quebec filmmaker at the Venice Film Festival makes the front pages; a Quebec VR project at Venice gets "a tiny blurb if you actually win."

Iregui can count the MAC's digital art exhibitions over the last decade on one hand, with fingers to spare. "Digital art is still the kid waiting to enter the grown-up party," he says.

This is part of why MUTEK matters beyond the deal-making: The connections that are made start to compound. Its Forum is where the field gets to think out loud. Roy is giving a talk at the Forum this year, and says it's the one place he can address questions he couldn't raise anywhere else: "Being asked questions that you never even thought of asking—that's vital for our ecosystem," he says. Tiewishaw has spent the last several years as a programming consultant there, using the platform to push forward Indigenous digital artists the way festivals once pushed her forward. Transversal met the collaborator behind one of its recent works at the Forum two years ago.

As Iregui puts it, the audience is part of the appeal because of their knowledge base. "MUTEK people are not impressed by the technology… It's a harder audience. That's where you get the real feedback." By his estimate, half the crowd isn't from Montreal, and that means the city's studios get to premiere work at home and reach the world anyway.

Roy has a theory about why the scene works, and it has nothing to do with technology: Montreal's studios are humble, he says, maybe overcompensating for a small-big-city inferiority complex, and unusually willing to collaborate—even with competitors. "It's not about protecting your piece," he says. "It's about making sure this whole thing grows, so that we all grow with it."

This August, that pie will get passed around, and everyone will get a slice.

It’ll be a feast.