Mutek Montreal asked me to share a few thoughts about art festivals as temporary utopias and the future of technology-oriented festivals.

I suggested that an art festival is an empty container/signifier (and it’s not a bad thing) and that the vary notion of 'future' (as in, technology-driven or predictable futures) is not entirely new, is debatable, and can be challenged. My experience as festival director, curator, and contributor tells me that an art festival can work as a cultural sensor for transitional times, a loose-ended machine that allows to deal with strange cultural specimens: the urgent, the one-of-a-kind, the unfinished, the elusive. Finally, if I were to imagine an art festival for the current times of multiple, overlapping crises, I’d focus on 3 things: The Synthetic Stack, the Infrastructure of Democracy, and The Festival in Reverse.