24–27 septembrie 2026 · MX – Muzeul Corneliu Mikloși
Programe colaterale până în 4 octombrie
Images keep getting sharper, sound cleaner, while technology promises to eliminate error, delay and every trace of friction. At precisely this moment, SIMULTAN chooses to look at what remains unresolved.
From 24 to 27 September, the festival returns to MX – Corneliu Mikloși Museum in Timișoara for its 21st edition, Against Resolution: Unfinished Thinking. Undisciplined Art. Instead of the drive towards perfection and optimisation, this year’s edition makes room for friction, imperfection and unfinished thinking: processes that remain open, imprecise gestures and improvisation.
Over four days, artists, musicians and theorists test these territories through sound, image, electricity, the body, language and space.
The live programme opens with a lo-fi project built around rudimentary, unstable and distinctly physical technology. In Beyond the Loudspeaker, Dirty Electronics & Tim Shaw do away with the conventional loudspeaker and search for alternatives: high-voltage sparks, plasma speakers, transducers and electromechanical devices set objects into vibration to produce sound, while the architecture of the space itself becomes the amplifier. French-Swiss composer Noémi Büchi presents Exuvie, an audiovisual performance about transformation and memory, tracing the ways in which the body absorbs and retains traces of the past.
Over the following days, the live programme moves through very different territories of sonic experimentation. Giovanni Lami presents Fantarombo, a project marking a shift in his practice, moving through non-linear polyrhythms somewhere between electroacoustic fiction and “fifth-world” structures. In Štrudel, Marina Džukljev & dieb13 / Dieter Kovačič build a series of delicate sonic whirlpools, seemingly tuned to the confused and unsettled times we live in. Alex Deak continues his research in real time in relation to Sound Lines – From Avant-Garde to Immersive, with a monochrome performance on mono-synth built around Xenakian structures, electronic ciné-beats and granular atmospheres.
Ion D & Horațiu Șerbănescu reactivate Australopitecus Oltensis, one of the early entities of the Future Nuggets ecosystem, moving through primitive techno and rudimentary dub. French-Swiss artist Julie Semoroz presents MYELINE, a live performance that starts from human and animal vocalisation and the ways information travels through the nervous system, as part of a research process at the intersection of sound, emotion and neuroscience.
Kasper T. Toeplitz presents Venus Blue, built as a dialogue between his music and a painting by Daria Gabriel.
Nicolas Montgermont returns to SIMULTAN with Chronicle of a Foretold End, a work that begins with the final transmission of the analogue weather satellite NOAA 19 and the disappearance of a technology that had been watching the Earth for decades.
In his live performances, dj sniff approaches the turntable as a musical instrument in its own right, building custom hardware and software to improvise with recorded sound.
Myriam Bleau closes the live programme with Hypermobility, an audiovisual performance in which electronic music structures are sculpted in the space above the audience through volumetric laser projections.
During the day, the festival shifts its attention away from the stage and towards the ideas, infrastructures and histories that make experimental culture possible. Nine talks open to the public bring artists, musicians, researchers and people who build cultural platforms and institutions to MX, in a programme aimed both at those already working in these fields and at anyone curious to find out what happens beyond the stage.
Felix Petrescu revisits the phenomenon of netlabels and the digital utopianism of the 1990s, when the internet could function as an independent infrastructure for distribution, community and experimentation. Dieter Kovačič / dieb13 traces the history of klingt.org, the independent platform and server he founded in 2000, which for more than 25 years has provided infrastructure for a network of artists, musicians, filmmakers, organisers and experimental projects.
Anamaria Pravicencu marks ten years of SEMI SILENT with a talk and listening session tracing some of the sound and radio works developed around the platform, with voice and the sonority of speech as a connecting thread. In Thou Shalt Not Speak, artist and researcher Erik Bünger starts from the relationship between voice, image and power, looking at how a voice can direct what we see and shape the way we interpret an image. dj sniff / Takuro Mizuta Lippit speaks about his recent research into audio culture in Japan during World War II.
Didier Aschour presents the work of GMEA – National Center for Music Creation Albi-Tarn, and a model of an institution designed to allow experimental music to exist not only as an event, but also as research, production and long-term practice.
Elena Dobîndă and Emilian Mărgărit (Image and Sound, Bucharest) speak about OFFBEAT, a flexible framework for encounters and dialogue around archives, collectors of musical obscurities, sound and experimentation. Artist and theorist Brandon LaBelle speaks about listening as a social and political practice, and about the possibility of moving from a culture centred on production towards one of receptivity. Kasper T. Toeplitz opens a discussion on the preservation of electronic music and the disappearance of technologies, drawing on the experience of Art Zoyd Studios.
Admission to all talks is free.
n parallel, the former tram depot itself becomes an instrument.
Sound Lines – From Avant-Garde to Immersive starts from the universe of Iannis Xenakis and brings MX / breath to the Corneliu Mikloși Museum, a 12-channel interactive sound installation by Alex Deak in which sound responds to the movement of visitors through the hall. In Răsărituri în formare, Mădălina Ciocanu starts from a familiar ritual in Moldova: sitting together over a glass of sunflower seeds and cracking them open as conversation unfolds. Fragments of sound, conversations and maps of memory turn this repetitive gesture into a way of thinking about how information circulates and is reshaped in relation to others.
Developed out of a residency in Timișoara, Vlad Hodrea presents magnum apus, a sound essay on the fading of Romanian folk magic, built from charms, ornithomancy and other practices documented in the field.
The research of Mădălina Ciocanu and Vlad Hodrea also comes together in Truths in Motion, a community radio programme proposed by the Institut français de Roumanie and Goethe-Institut, exploring how information, memory and local knowledge circulate. For several hours, a tram at the Corneliu Mikloși Museum becomes a radio studio, bringing together artists, journalists and people from the city in a live broadcast, on air and online.
Techno-natural Mutations, a project proposed by Marginal, brings together works by Lorena Cocora and Alexandra Costea and by Miguel Teodoro, tracing the increasingly difficult-to-separate relationships between organisms, infrastructures and machines.
The screenings and listening programme extends the festival beyond its opening weekend. Two works by Erik Bünger, The Mime and the Ape and Nature See You, continue the artist’s research into voice, image and language. At the invitation of Image and Sound, the programme includes the Takashi Ito Film Anthology, a two-DVD set from the OFFBEAT collection bringing together 20 experimental and avant-garde short films made by acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Takashi Ito between 1981 and 2002. The music for most of Ito’s films is by composer and sound engineer Takashi Inagaki.
The OFFBEAT listening series, also proposed by Image and Sound, brings Vladimir Lenhart, George Staicu and Dragoș Rusu to SIMULTAN, moving through cassette collections and Ethno-Noise, vinyl and the voice as experimental material, as well as recordings and reinterpretations of early Romanian folk music.
Ars Electronica arrives at SIMULTAN through its On Tour programme with PANIC – Prix Ars Electronica Selection: a selection of nine recent works from the field of New Animation Art, brought together around themes of anxiety, ecological collapse, technology and worlds on the verge of breaking down.
Some projects come to an end during the festival; others are only beginning. This logic of work in progress runs through the entire edition and continues through the side programmes until 4 October.
2026 also marks another moment for SIMULTAN. After twenty editions, the festival is preparing, for the first time, a publication tracing its own history through essays, interviews, archival material and critical texts by participants and collaborators. Founded in Timișoara in 2005, at a time when media art and experimental sound were still finding their place on the local scene, SIMULTAN has spent two decades in a territory resistant to fixed disciplinary boundaries. The 21st edition has no intention of resolving that indeterminacy.
Quite the opposite. SIMULTAN XXI — a workshop for an uncertain future.
Early Bird passes for all four evenings of live performances are available for 100 lei until 15 September. After that date, the festival pass costs 150 lei, while a single-evening ticket is 50 lei.
Exhibitions and talks are free to attend, and admission is free for school students.
Tickets are available via iabilet.ro and at the festival entrance.
Proiect inițiat de – SIMULTAN.org
Funded and organised in partnership with The Municipality of Timișoara through the Center for Projects
Organizational partners: French Institute of Romania, Goethe-Institut, Werktank, IKLECTIK, Aksioma, obsolete studio, SEMI SILENT, Plan Zero, MUTEK, Fundația DALA, Linii Sonore, Ars Electronica, Forumul Cultural Austriac, Image and Sound, The Secret Garden, Cărturești, Rezidența9.
Supported by: the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs.
Media partners: Radio România Cultural, RFI România, Best of Timișoara, Revista Arta, Teletext Platforma, Scena9, Revista Sunete, Zile și Nopți, Arhiva de sunet, STPT