simultan 2025 re:mediate

The 20th edition of SIMULTAN Festival will take place between 2-5 October 2025 in Timisoara, Romania, continuing the exploration of the relationship between art, technology and society through different artistic methods and practices.

The use of the transitive term Re:MEDIATE for the current edition is not a festive one, but rather a call to action, as well as an opportunity to reflect on the journey the festival has taken over the past two decades.

Remediation is a process, as formulated by Bolter and Grusin on the evolving phenomenon of new media technologies, which adapt and transform older media forms, creating a dynamic progression in the media landscape. Extending this logic beyond visual aesthetics, the natural and essential question arises: what can we, in fact, remediate today?

Re:MEDIATE

The evolutionary phenomenon of new media technologies adapts and transforms older media forms, creating a dynamic progression in the media landscape. This process, as described by Bolter and Grusin, involves both immediacy – the tendency towards immersive, fluid experiences – and hypermediacy – the awareness of media layers, of their presence as media.

In the contemporary art environment, this situation generates hybrid forms, where the old and the new cohabit, and the result becomes a space of continuous reconfiguration.

But extending this logic beyond visual aesthetics, the natural and essential question arises: what can we actually remediate today … a situation, a relationship, a feeling?

In a world in a continuous process of disintegration and reconfiguration, remediation is no longer just a technological or aesthetic concept, but a subtle form of ontological rebalancing. In mental space, the overlap has become obvious: between crises and solutions, between the past and an as yet unnamed future, between memory and forgetting. In the context of these dualities, remediation appears as an organic necessity – not just as a reformulation of the old through the new, but as a reconciliation between forms, discourses, identities.

The political no longer seems to have the strength to establish coherent narratives without being contaminated by viral aesthetics or the aesthetics of fear; the economy seeks itself in a recycling loop of failed paradigms; and society, caught between nostalgia and anxiety, manifests itself in increasingly strange echoes.

Remediation thus becomes a form of symbolic survival, an alchemy in which ruins become raw material for new meanings. It is not restoration, nor revolution, but a slow movement of rewriting reality in terms of a hybrid language, born of the collision between what was and what could be. It acts as a vital tension between memory and becoming, between exhausted forms and their potential to be reborn in another register.

After all, McLuhan warned that the tendency to focus exclusively on content, blinds us to the expression of the form. Mediums are not neutral channels, but forms that create perceptions and identities, and remediation is precisely the gesture by which one world is born from another, not as a copy, but as a rewriting of memory in the language of the present.