Metacreation Lab Newsletter | July 2025

Philippe Pasquier on CreaTeMe Podcast

In May 2025, Philippe was featured on the podcast hosted by CreaTeMe (Centre for Excellence in Creative Use of Technologies in Music Education) at the University of Agder. He discusses MIDI-GPT, human–AI collaboration in music, and ethical questions around creative AI.

K‑Phi‑A Live at MUTEK Montréal 2025

K‑Phi‑A is a Vancouver-based trio composed of Keon Ju Maverick Lee, Philippe Pasquier (Monobor), and VJ Amagi (Jun Yuri). They will present their performance Revival at MUTEK Montréal on August 22, 2025, as part of the festival’s 25th edition (Aug 19–24). Blending live music, visuals, and artificial intelligence, the trio brings a uniquely collaborative experience to the stage.

Revival is a high-energy collision of human spontaneity and AI-driven expression. Combining live drumming, electronic sound, and generative visuals, the performance features intelligent systems that initiate, adapt, and respond in real time, blurring the line between performer and machine. As rhythms and images evolve fluidly, Revival offers a glimpse into the future of co-creative live performance.

Diffusion Model Bending in ComfyUI

A new ComfyUI plugin, by Metacreation Lab’s PhD student Ahmed Abuzuraiq, introduces model bending for diffusion models—a method for injecting custom operations (like addition, rotation, or noise) into specific layers of a generative model to explore new aesthetic directions. This experimental tool aims to open up the “black box” and give artists direct creative influence over the generative process.

The plugin is available on GitHub and through Comfy’s node manager. Ahmad is currently seeking feedback and offering short walkthroughs. Reach out if you're curious or want to try it out. Please also check out the following paper related to this plugin.

New Paper at the ACM Creativity & Cognition 2025

Metacreation Lab’s PhD student, Ahmed Abuzuraiq, along with Philippe Pasquier, presented a paper at the 3rd Explainable AI in the Arts (XAIxArts 3) workshop happening as part of the ACM Creativity & Cognition 2025 conference in June.

In this paper, Philippe and I argue that large-scale generative AI is being treated as black-boxed commodities and that the lack of explainability in these models—and their proliferation through model repositories—further reinforces that view. We argue that model crafting, i.e. the creative training, adaptation and manipulation of generative models, can change artists’ relationship to AI from one of commodification into one of materiality. In particular, we present a plugin for model bending in the node-based environment of ComfyUI, which allows artists to interactively pick and manipulate many parts of the generative diffusion process. We show that model bending could be used both for creative expression as well as for developing a tacit understanding of the AI model’s behaviour through sustained engagement.

Metacreation Lab at the 3rd ArtIA Symposium

The third edition of the ArtIA Symposium will take place at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) in Montréal on August 19, 2025. The third event will be open to the public for the first time, marking the end of phase one and launching phase two, focused on developing local AI alternatives for digital creation.

Philippe Pasquier will moderate a panel on small data and model crafting, highlighting approaches to building generative models with minimal or culturally specific datasets. The Metacreation Lab will also showcase four free, open-source tools for AI-assisted creation: Calliope, a web platform for musical co-composition; MACAT, an agent that improvises with musicians in real time; Autolume, a no-code AI visual synthesizer; and Model Bending in ComfyUI, enabling hands-on control of diffusion models.

“ReVerie: Sense” at MUTEK Montréal 2025

ReVerie: Sense is an immersive installation by Metacreation Lab’s PhD student Keon Ju Maverick Lee, a PhD student at the Metacreation Lab, and interdisciplinary artist Pinyao Liu. It will be presented at MUTEK Montréal 2025 on August 20.

ReVerie: Sense invites you to whisper your dreams into an AI system that transforms them into floating fragments and shifting soundscapes. This living dream archive merges memory and simulation, letting participants co-create a surreal, emotional world shaped by voice, vision, and machine perception.

AIMC 2025

The Sixth Conference on AI Music Creativity will be held 10–12 September 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. The Metacreation Lab will present two papers—one on designing tools for computer-assisted composition and another on AI-assisted sound design for novices. The lab will also offer a full-day tutorial and present the performance Revival during the event. Stay tuned for more details.

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