The Stiftung Planetarium Berlin together with the transmediale Vorspiel, MUTEK festivals in Montreal and Tokyo and the Society for Arts and Technology invite for a profound journey to rediscover the sublimeness of nature through the immersive, digital arts.

Iwakura, created by Kazuya Nagaya, Ali M. Demirel and Maurice Jones, explores the materiality of nature through sacred Shintoist rock formations. Metaract by Manami Sakamoto and Yuri Urano aestheticizes the “cycles of time”, which present the grounds for the relations with our natural environments.

In conversation with Lee Smilon on his contribution on Temporal Realism to Beth Coleman’s REALITY WAS WHATEVER HAPPENED: OCTAVIA BUTLER AI AND OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS exhibition opening and micro symposium.

UKAI Projects invited me to give a guest lecture as part of its residency program Poetics of Synthetic Language on my research-creation work Soundscapes of an Earthly Community talking about conceptual approaches to sonic agents and assemblages and thematically on the question of critical mineral mining.

Talking on this panel investigating the role of technology in future festivals together with Martin Honzik (Ars Electronica), Jay Kim (BIFAN), Kun-Ying LIN (Luxury Logico), and moderated by Ya-ling HUANG (YunTech) as part of the Taiwan Technology x Culture Expo (TTXC) 2023 in Kaohsiung.

The full-dome at the Society for Arts and Technology will host the North American Premiere of Iwakura as part of the 24th edition of MUTEK.

Open Reel Ensemble closes the opening day of the Forum with a performative Q&A on reels. Two-time laureate of the Japan Media Arts Festival, Open Reel Ensemble, founded in 2009 and whose current members include Haruka Yoshida, Ei Wada and Masaru Yoshida, has an undoubtedly signature approach to creation and music making.
Using old reel-to-reel tape recorders from the ‘70s and ‘80s hooked up to controllers and obsolete electrical devices, the ensemble delivers a live musical performance as irresistible as it is atypical.

Featuring the band in conversation with MUTEK’s, Maurice Jones this session will dive into Open Reel Ensemble’s motivations behind their uncanny musical universe, the definition of their self-described style of “magnetikpunk” and the experience of providing music for four Issey Miyake’s fashion shows. The conversation will be followed by a live demonstration of how the group uses vintage reel-to-reel tape recorders as instruments, ahead of their performance at Nocturne 1 on August 23rd.

MUTEK together with four Canadian and two international partners launched the Future Festivals think tank in March 2023. Following Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson’s opening provocation, the panel invites Future Festivals partners Naomi Johnson, Executive Director of imagineNative, FTA’s David Lavoie, New Now Festival’s Jasmin Grimm, and MUTEK's Maurice Jones, for a call to action on not only how to rethink the future of festivals but more importantly how to build it together.

For the European premiere of Iwakura we travelled to Zeiss Planetarium Bochum as part of the satellite events of New Now Festival 2023.

The Digital Lab Africa Acceleration and Bootcamp program invites a selected group of emerging digital artists and musicians from the African continent for a series of workshops and masterclasses to accelerate their artistic career.

As part of the internationalization efforts I will hold a masterclass on how to approach and engage international festivals of electronic music and digital arts for this cohort of artists.

The concept of Artificial Intelligence is elusive. Even for experts from a variety of fields it is hard to pin down what exactly constitutes AI. This panel discussion invites Montreal-based multidisciplinary artists Myriam Bleau and Greg Debicki (Woulg), and Japanese AI researcher and musician Nao Tokui, who all engage with AI in the performances they present at this year’s festival. Led by MUTEK.JP’s Artistic Director and critical AI researcher Maurice Jones the discussion explores the idea of intelligence as an emergent feature of co-creative human-machine interaction. Drawing upon the artists’ practice the panel questions emergence as the possibility for a multiplicity of previously unknown and undetermined interactions to take place in stark contradiction to techno-deterministic narratives.

Maurice Jones, MUTEK.JP Artistic Director and critical AI researcher, talks to Chinese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist Sougwen Chung and Japanese innovator and artists Daito Manabe. Following Sougwen's live premiere of Flora Rearing Agricultural Network a day prior the conversation will see a joint exploration of approaches to human/non-human collaboration both conceptually and through artistic practices. This conversation will dive into the intersection of the organic and technological in human-machine assemblages, emergent intelligence in self-sustained systems, and the theoretical and practical implications of these on artistic practice and beyond.

After 2 years in the making the full-dome performance Iwakura premiered at Miraikan - The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation as part of the 7th edition of MUTEK.JP in Tokyo.

Dr. Fumio Shimpo of the Faculty of Policy Management, Graduate school of Media and Governance at Keio University invited me to present my doctoral research on public participation in AI governance in Canada, Germany, and Japan. The guest lecture will take place in the frame of the Information Law class at Keio University’s Global Information and Governance Academic Program.

GIGA at Keio University SFC