Radical Rituals, Radical Recommendations at MUTEK 2025
by Kaitlyn Davies
·
We asked Forum speakers for their radical rituals and reading recommendations, ahead of their participation in MUTEK 2025, taking place 19-24th August in Montreal, Quebec.
Visit our library on-site at MUTEK Forum, 19-21st August at Monument-National.
--
McKenzie Wark
Writing on Raving, Edited by Zoë Beery, Geoffrey Mak, McKenzie Wark
"Raving in the morning is my favorite ritual, giving me life, love, community, intensity, possibility."
--
Austin Robey
Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, Edited By Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
"Annual democratic elections for Subvert’s board. Members voting to control their own platform’s future."
--
Jason Voltaire AKA Martyn Bootyspoon
Get Real - Art + Real Time + Theory + Practice + History by Morten Søndergaard
"Sport resets me—running or hitting the sweet spot. Tennis taught me timing: be in position, stay patient, then move. Same with ideas."
--
Alice Bucknell
Rambunctious Games: A Manifesto for Environmental Game Design by Alenda Y. Chang
"Stumbling on this essay a few years back shifted my approach to ecological storytelling in game worlds. Alenda's earlier book Playing Nature covers a wide array of topics in environmental game design but Rambunctious Games offers a blueprint for thinking of the game medium as an ecological system in its own right. Offering a handful of approaches for designing games that are more complex, more open-ended, more affective and more feral, the text pushed me to consider the game environment as an agent or player, as a narrator or protagonist versus a backdrop or context, which is an idea that fundamentally drives my work today."
"While it sounds simple, I like to start each day with a short walk in my local environment. Being in the world (touching grass) is paradoxically such an important part to creating simulated ones -- which I think of as carrier bags for complex systems, interactions, and subjectivities. Noticing the agencies and goings-on in the world around me on a tactile and sensory level opens my brain up to considering the multiple scales and narrative interplay at work in speculative fiction storytelling and game design, and this attentive sensitivity feeds into whatever's going on at the studio that day."
--
Salome Asega
Disability Visibility by Alice Wong
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
"In a society that moves fast, choose inefficiency to force slowness. Take the scenic route and see something new."
--
Libby Heaney
Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, Edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams
"Quantum Feeling"
🦑 Sip cold-warm dark-light air
🌊 Breathe ocean waves
👻 Ghost voices in-out
💦 Submerge deep/shallow
🌠 Float across the multiverse
--
Sasha Stiles
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman
"Daily writing sessions with my AI alter ego, Technelegy — part poetry workshop, part coding session."
--
Ana Brzezińska
Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
"The only ritual I keep is the one of giving myself the freedom to go when I feel it’s time to move on."