MIRA turns fifteen and points its instruments at algorithmic perception

Filed from The Observatory: two days in November when Barcelona turns its instruments on the machines, and the machines look back.

MIRA is fifteen years old. The digital arts festival runs on 6 and 7 November 2026 at Fira Montjuïc, and this edition leans hard into a subject the city has been circling for a while: posthuman ecosystems, algorithmic perception, and the shifting line between a body and a voice and a machine.

Pinar Yoldas brings An Ecosystem of Excess, a speculative world built to survive inside the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Sarabiotic installs Evolutionary Signals, a generative environment drawn from the ocean floor that reacts when people stand near it. Andreas Lutz takes the simple act of looking, and of being looked at, and feeds it to a system that learns from the faces it meets. These are not screens with pictures on them. They are environments that change because you walked in.

The body becomes an interface too. AEDOSSYNTH, by Marc Arnela with I AM JAS, gives voice to three artificial heads through real-time vocal synthesis. Óldo Érreve ties technology to the body and to ancestral memory in IMAGO Teōsinte. Elsewhere, Onionlab takes over the main stage with Resonant Field, a light installation that listens to the sound around it and pushes that reaction out onto the dancefloor.

The music sits alongside the art rather than under it. Twenty-seven acts are confirmed, among them Arca, Shygirl, Tortoise, Helena Hauff, Max Cooper, Nicola Cruz, Machine Girl, and the collaborative show from Nosaj Thing with Daito Manabe. Ryoichi Kurokawa returns with a piece where sound, image and time move as one architecture. Grand River premieres a new electroacoustic show called Temporary. Space Afrika build a live set from ambient, dub and orchestral textures.

What keeps MIRA worth watching is the local layer. Students and recent graduates from EINA, ELISAVA, IED Barcelona and La Salle show work here, next to names that tour the world. That mix is deliberate, and it is why the festival has stayed in the city for fifteen years instead of turning into a touring brand.

A full pass costs 117 euros. A single day is 63 euros, with a two-ticket promo at 60 each. Both days happen at Fira Montjuïc, in Barcelona.

The full programme and tickets are at https://mirafestival.com/en/tickets/.

■ The Observatory — Instruments turned on the machines, and the machines looking back.