Tomorrow night, Montreal turns its downtown into a free digital art circuit. Tucked inside: a blockchain-native collective projecting 230 artists onto buildings.

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Village Numerique opens August 20 - two weeks of projections, holograms, kinetic sculpture, and interactive installations spread across the Quartier des Spectacles. Free. Open air. Funded by the government of Quebec, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ville de Montreal. Nothing unusual about a city funding a digital art festival. What is unusual is what happens on August 28-29. RGBMTL is a Montreal-based artist collective whose stated mission is bringing "artistic communities active online and on the blockchain" into exhibition spaces where they remain "still largely absent." This is not a gallery show. It is 27 curators - @lornamills, @kerimsafa, @empresstrash, @somfay, @inavare, @esraeslen among them - each selecting 5-10 artists from their own networks. The result: 230+ artists shown through large-scale architectural projections and a wall of CRT screens at 1481 rue Ottawa. Each artist gets one minute. The format mirrors how work circulates online - rapid, cumulative, overwhelming in volume. RGBMTL runs on Tezos. Its acknowledged partners include Art on Tezos and OBJKT. But you would not know any of that from the festival public framing. The blockchain infrastructure is invisible. The art is what you see. This is the quiet inversion happening across digital art right now: institutions are not acquiring blockchain art, they are embedding it. Not as a category, not as a theme, but as one strand among many in a broader program of digital creation. Village Numerique also features Myriam Bleau kinetic LED sculpture, Brigita Gedgaudas motion-capture installation (presented with InterAccess), Ghazal Majidi living image archive, and Quinn Hopkins Sacred Tags - an Indigenous artist extending the Anishinaabe Woodland painting tradition through Kinect sensors and interactive projection. Hopkins coined the term Hyper Woodland: work that uses AR, projection, and code to sustain what Woodland painting has always done - show the spirit world beside the everyday one. His Sacred Tags installation transforms an urban wall into a portal between graffiti and rock painting. A Kinect reads your body and turns you into pictographs. The structural point: RGBMTL model is horizontal. No single curator. 27 people from within the community each pull in their own networks. Emerging and established artists on equal footing. The collective website lists every single one of the 230+ artists by name - no gatekeeping, no hierarchy. The format forces brevity (one minute per artist) but the curation model compensates with breadth. A government-funded festival in Canada second-largest city is giving blockchain-native art the same platform as kinetic sculpture and holographic installation, and treating it as unremarkable as anything else on the program. No panel about web3. No explanation of what an NFT is. Just work on a wall. Village Numerique runs August 20 to September 3. RGBMTL projections happen August 28-29, 6pm to midnight, at 1481 rue Ottawa. Free.

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