Hyperreality 2026

Hyperreality is an annual festival for experimental and electronic music in Vienna. On May 21 the festival will screen several films at the Filmcasino that contextualize the line‑up for May 22 and 23 at the Otto‑Wagner‑Areal.

Hyperreality Festival 2026
Reality is often framed as the opposite of staging — as what remains once the hype has passed. Club spaces have always unsettled this idea. On the dancefloor, perception and the sense of time begin to shift: repetition stretches the moment, bodies synchronize, intensities emerge and dissolve again. What remains are rarely clear narratives, but fragments — impressions, atmospheres, brief states of shared presence.

At the same time, club culture itself is not a stable ground. While parts of the scene are increasingly absorbed in global economies of attention, other spaces continue to emerge where music operates differently: not as entertainment or self-marketing, but as a way of organising social relations, enabling collective experience, and challenging existing hierarchies.

Hyperreality approaches electronic and experimental music in this sense — not as a finished work or fixed genre, but as a time-based, spatial and social practice. Music emerges in the moment, through the interplay of sound, architecture, duration and collective attention. The 2026 programme brings together artists who engage with these intersections formally, conceptually and aesthetically.

This year’s edition once again takes place at Otto Wagner Areal and expands into Filmcasino, adding a film programme that further contextualises the festival. Over three days, concerts, DJ sets, club nights, performances and screenings unfold across both venues. Rather than treating genres as stable categories, Hyperreality is interested in moments where musical orders begin to shift: when techno becomes texture, voices become rhythm, or performance reconfigures the dancefloor.