[Carsten Nicolai's media wall at MUTEK / photo: Tobias c. van Veen]

MUTEK was excellent this year, fantastic in fact. I should qualify that statement by pointing out that I more or less skipped the larger events and stuck to the AV showcases, installations and panels - which were all great save the floundering dubstep/bass music showcase at Metropolis. I wrote an overview of the multimedia performance at the festival for Rhizome and in putting together that article I realized that it is this stream of programming that keeps pulling me back to Montreal each spring. There were some real highlights: hearing Uwe Schmidt bang out a set of post-everything house (with countless nods to Chicago) and the entire raster-noton showcase for that matter, Robert Henke and Christopher Bauder's incredible Atom installation, Artificiel's POWEr knocked me out of my chair, SND, the AntiVJ installation, Wolfgang Voigt - I could keep going. After all this it has taken a few days to shake the cobwebs loose and start thinking again.

I've decided my post for Rhizome is as close as I'll get to a "review" of the festival. I do have two posts in the works though - some words about POWEr and an interview with Robert Henke and Christopher Bauer (that I need to transcribe). I also recorded an extended conversation with Toronto's Greg Hermanovic and Markus Heckmann on their work with raster-noton and practice in general but it is utterly unintelligible. Peter Kirn partook in said discussion and recorded it as well - presumably it will be popping up on Create Digital Motion in the coming weeks.

We now return you to your erratically scheduled programming...