08/21/2026
Meet Aurélie, Kamyar, and François!
Returning to the Forum for their third year, their experience and support are crucial to this year’s iteration.
While Machine Agencies has presented various projects under a common vision over the last two years, this time the team's complementary skillsets and backgrounds are uniting around a single project: The Monolith.
👤Aurélie Petit is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chaire de recherche du Québec sur l'intelligence artificielle et le numérique francophones (IANF) in Montréal, Canada, where she is working on the project “(Re)Generative AI for Culture.” She holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from Concordia University in Montreal. As a researcher, she works on the intersection of animation and technology with a focus on gender and sexuality. In recent years, she has held research positions at the Canada Research Chair in Digital Regulation in Work and Life, the AI + Society initiative at the University of Ottawa, and the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research. Her intermedia research-creation projects have been presented at the MUTEK Forum 2024, the MUTEK Forum 2025, and HTMlles 2026.
👤Kamyar “noak” Karimi is an Iranian-Canadian digital storyteller and sound artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His practice begins from the idea that stories do not belong to a single medium. Within dynamic human networks, narratives circulate, fragment, and re-form through different platforms, and the tools we use to tell stories shape what becomes legible, shareable, or erased. This perspective is reflected in his background across programming, game design, and sound design, where he has worked with interactive systems and audio to build narrative experiences that move between technical structure and lived affect.
👤François Lespinasse is a transdisciplinary researcher and artist from Montréal studying the productive frictions between the humanities and Neuro-AI. After completing an undergraduate and master’s degree in cognitive neuroscience, he is now a doctoral student conducting research-creation in anthropology at Concordia University, where he is affiliated with the Milieux Institute and the Hexagram Network, with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. His research designs spaces in which technology mediates expressive and contemplative practices, shedding light on novel forms of embodied, distributed meaning-making across human and non-human agents.
🎟️Get your passes now and join us on August 27! (Special pricing available for students) https://forum.mutek.org/en/tickets
The Monolith is presented in collaboration with Réseau Hexagram
Producers:
Aurélie Petit
Bart Simon
Facilitators:
Cristina Jimenez
Paolo Grumi
Syd Hamidreza Hosseini
Milton Lim
Creative Direction:
François Lespinasse
Technical Direction:
Kamyar Karimi
📅 August 27, 2026
⏱️ 10 AM - 12:30 PM
📍 Édifice Wilder - Espace Danse | 1435, rue de Bleury
🤝 Concordia University MUTEK Montréal
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