THEME 2025
life is good in the new real
Welcome to 2025, a time when the boundaries between physical and digital realities have dissolved. Our world, long extended and shaped by technology, stands at a crossroads. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a tool—it is embedded in our art, our thinking, and our everyday lives. But as we move deeper into this hybrid condition, an urgent question arises: How do we reconnect while immersed in the digital?
LIFE IS GOOD IN THE NEW REAL is not a celebration of AI. It’s a space to explore its tension with the body, with ecology, with human imagination. This year’s edition invites artists, thinkers, and audiences to reflect on the growing rift – and potential reconnection – between humans, technology, and the natural world.
Many of the artists featured in our festival programme work with technology – but not to perfect or automate, rather to question and reimagine. They use their own voices, their bodies, natural materials, and handmade instruments to compose with uncertainty. From the sonic microbiomes of Daphne von Schrader, to Merche Blasco’s electromagnetic listening devices or Nyokabi Kariũki’s deeply embodied sonic world – this festival is not driven by technological innovation, but by imagination.
We ask: Can technology lead us to a better future? If we use the planet’s resources to build digital futures – what remains? Is it even possible to create sustainable digital worlds without sacrificing our ecological foundations?
Through immersive performances, field-recorded textures, and speculative sound architectures, we open a dialogue between digital fictions and organic realities. Our focus is on sound, audiovisual art, and performance – as acts of resonance, resistance, and care.
In 2025, SONIC TERRITORIES Festival will unfold across Vienna, from the periphery to the city center, activating a range of social and ecological spaces.
Technology becomes a medium of friction, not escape.
Vienna, July 17th 2025
CURATORIAL STATEMENT & ARTIST SELECTION
The 2025 edition of SONIC TERRITORIES Festival invites audiences into a world where sonic imagination meets technological friction. Under the theme LIFE IS GOOD IN THE NEW REAL, the festival explores how artists navigate a reality shaped by artificial intelligence, ecological uncertainty, and the limits of human resilience. The program brings together a vibrant international cast of performers, sound artists, and audiovisual experimenters, each of whom opens new spaces between the digital and the organic, the speculative and the embodied.
Among the highlights, Nyokabi Kariũki (KE) presents the world premiere of a deeply personal solo performance and leads a body percussion workshop and a listening session dedicated to Halim El-Dabh. Austrian icon Fennesz (AT) reassembles his 2024 album Mosaic live, enveloping the audience in shimmering textures and ambient decay. Merche Blasco (ES/US) returns with Fauna, a performance using handmade instruments and electromagnetic sensors to explore unheard energies, while her collaborative piece Plankturutaña with Marina Cyrino (BR) and Ute Wassermann (DE) pushes the boundaries between human, animal, and technological sound.
Audiovisual performances are central to this year’s edition. Sara Persico & Mika Oki (IT/FR) create an immersive light-and-sound landscape in Sphaîra, inspired by an architectural dome in Lebanon. The Spanish duo Cortical (ES) present noise-driven techno fused with sci-fi visual maximalism. In contrast, Jakob Schauer (AT) premieres End of Resilience, a series for organ and electronics exploring emotional rupture and sonic endurance, while Alex Franz Zehetbauer (AT) transforms a modernist church into a dreamlike improvisational zone with organ, lyre, hydrophones, and voice. Raphael Rogiński (PL) performs Talàn, a meditative and boundary-defying solo programme that merges raw improvisation with deep listening, shaped by his unique approach to folk, blues, and spiritual music.
Many artists draw from ecological, personal and diasporic roots. HUUUM (AT/TR) blend Iranian folk melodies with electronic and jazz influences, while Sanna Lu Una (AT) combines voice, cello and field recordings in a reflection on nature and inner transformation. Marta Beauchamp (IT/UK) uses neuroscience and sound sculpture to turn biological rhythms into tactile sonic spaces.
The club spectrum of the festival spans raw experimentation and euphoric rupture. LOUFR (PL) brings an emotionally charged hybrid of hyperpop and contemporary composition. PÖ (UG/FR) electrifies with a mix of funk, dancehall and experimental vocals, while Fæ Bestia (CZ) premieres her gothic hyperpop in a dramatic, theatrical set. Viennese artist Misonica (AT) delivers an ambient-techno live set full of intensity and narrative depth, and Natasha Moreno (BY/AT) uses modular synths to create synaesthetic, noisy soundscapes rooted in scientific phenomena.