An unexpected sleepover, lasers and the sexual history of the internet: Now or Never is back

Now or Never, the City of Melbourne’s multi-award-winning winter festival, is returning from 19 to 30 August 2026, with a program built around the theme A Whole New World.

That means immersive technology, AI, digital storytelling, laser beams, mist installations, a sleepover under a dome, and a talk about the sexual history of the internet. Standard winter plans, really.

Across 12 days and two weekends, more than 250 artists, thinkers and performers will take over Melbourne’s most iconic buildings and public spaces. There are 150 events across the program, including 20 world premieres and festival exclusives, and a genuinely impressive chunk of it is completely free.

This year, the festival aims to reshape how audiences experience the city by expanding the program into Southbank and along the Yarra River. Seasoned festival goers and random passers by alike will be treated to a trail of interactive art that will pepper the precinct.

Now or Never

• When: 19–30 August 2026
• Where: Various venues across Melbourne
• Tickets here

Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here. 

 

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Bring your PJs: it’s a Royal Exhibition Building sleepover

The Royal Exhibition Building program might be the festival’s most audacious offering yet. REB has featured in Now or Never’s programming since the festival launched, but nothing quite like this.

SOMNIA: William Basinski / Bendik Giske is an overnight sleep concert under the iconic dome, where William Basinski performs his genre-defining Disintegration Loops as audiences bed down for the night. Joining the sleepover is Norwegian musician, composer and saxophonist Bendik Giske, with a solo performance in its most elemental form, presented especially for SOMNIA. This is music to surrender to. Yes, you’re sleeping at the Royal Exhibition Building. Bring your pillow.

The Breath Haus x Now or Never weaves live music, breathwork and meditation into a full sensory experience featuring David and Daniel Wilfred – members of  Narrm-based ensemble Hand to Earth – fusing ancient knowledge with contemporary sound, a more active counterpart to the sleepover’s deep stillness.

Also at the REB, pianist Maki Namekawa brings Philip Glass’s Etudes 1–10 to life inside the vast building. Ten of the most meditative and technically demanding works in the contemporary piano repertoire, performed in a space that can actually hold them.

That’s followed by Orchestra Victoria performing In the Upper Room, a rarely staged work of driving momentum and layered sound.

In and around Melbourne Town Hall

Melbourne Town Hall is the festival’s central hub, hosting world premiere performances, free installations and three big music nights.

Now or Never commissioned two major new works here: Time Remaining, a hypnotic Chunky Move production that stages an unsettling dialogue between bodies, lasers and contemporary machines; and PRESENCE, a new laser work by Australian audio-visual artist Robin Fox that turns Melbourne Town Hall into a vast, immersive environment of light and sound.

Laser beams synchronise with live sound in real time, forming geometric planes and three-dimensional environments that dissolve and rebuild around you. It is one of the festival’s most ambitious commissions, and it also happens to be free to walk into.

Also at the Town Hall, Revivification attempts to posthumously extend the artistic life of experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who died in 2021, using his biological material. It is exactly as strange as it sounds.

Out in the forecourt, two free works presented with Arts Korea Lab are worth building time into your evening for. Knot Protocol / 매듭 프로토콜 by HKASON is a kinetic sculpture possessed by an algorithm that mutates its own form, over and over.

And Row, Row, Row Your Boat / 「노 저어라, 노 저어라, 노 저어라 네 배를 by Jung Haejung / 정혜정 uses 3D-scanned faces from Australia and Korea, rendered via game engine technology into a video installation that manages to be genuinely unsettling despite its nursery-rhyme title. Both are free, both are outdoors, and both reward a slow look. They also form part of the broader free trail, but more on that in the next section!

The three music nights are also anchored here: Chuleo Club brings A.Chal, Slim Soledad, LIZZ, Dinamarca and Zalina; Finding Figaro features Octave One, Sleep D x Hybrid Man, JNETT and Baby G; and the festival closes out with Robin Fox, MY DISCO, Jeho Yun + Kyoungjin So.

Now or Never free programming: lasers, mist and a digital hallucination

Much of the most spectacular work this year costs nothing, strung along a walkable route from Melbourne Town Hall to Birrarung Marr, Hamer Hall and Evan Walker Bridge.

That includes the two Arts Korea Lab forecourt works mentioned above, Knot Protocol / 매듭 프로토콜 and Row, Row, Row Your Boat / 「노 저어라, 노 저어라, 노 저어라 네 배를, which sit at the Melbourne Town Hall end of the trail.

Multimmersion 浸漬的()線 Upside Down V2 by AKA Chang transforms a stretch of the Yarra River through a contemplative exploration of light, space and reflection.

Chang is a Taiwanese artist whose work consistently finds something strange and beautiful in the intersection of digital and natural environments, and this one turns a familiar waterfront into something completely otherworldly.

Right nearby, The Falls Before Us by Emily Parsons-Lord makes the Evan Walker Bridge vanish entirely into mist, the kind of work that stops pedestrians dead in their tracks and makes the city feel briefly, beautifully unfamiliar.

Mapped onto Hamer Hall, XYZZY Redux returns after captivating global audiences since its debut at Now or Never’s inaugural 2023 program, arriving back as a pure digital hallucination in an entirely new context. If you saw it three years ago, it’ll look nothing like you remember.

Families are particularly welcome from 6pm on weekends across all the free outdoor programming, and the whole trail is designed to be explored on foot.

Let’s talk about the internet, enshittification and the secret life of soil

The talks program is where things get genuinely thought-provoking. A Sexual History of the Internet sees Mindy Seu present a communal ritual, an excavation of how sexuality shaped the web from its earliest days and a reminder that the internet has always been stranger and more human than its corporate form suggests.

Cory Doctorow digs into enshittification: the creeping decay of online platforms and what can be done to reclaim digital futures. It’s a talk that will feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s watched their favourite app get progressively worse year after year.

Derrick Gee’s Radio Hour brings his hugely popular show to the festival as a live, shared listening experience, weaving music, stories and conversations, with special guests Julia
Jacklin and cult record label founder Michael Kucyk, into something that feels more like an event than a standard talk. A nice counterpoint to the heavier subject matter elsewhere in the program.

Rounding out the series are sessions on the threat and promise of AI, the secret life of soil, and the state of music criticism, a lineup that covers enough ground to pull in curious minds well beyond the usual arts festival crowd.

And there’s more!

Returning favourites Library Up Late at State Library Victoria, Friday Night Social at Science Gallery Melbourne and Queer PowerPoint at Fed Square are all back.

Now or Never features a diverse range of events across its four pillars of art, ideas, sound and technology, with a focus on supporting the LGBTIQ community, gender-diverse artists, First Nations talent and other diverse cultures.

A large portion of the program is free or affordably priced, with specific ticket pricing available for First Nations audiences. The festival also maintains a zero-tolerance policy for harassment across all events.

The full program drops 18 June, with tickets on sale now.

For more information, head here.

Beat is a proud media partner of Now or Never.