Later this month, ’s civic buildings, river edges and spaces will be handed over to artists working across , sound, performance and digital media.
Running from Wednesday 19th to Sunday 30th August, the fourth edition of Now or Never brings together more than 250 local and international for over 150 events, including 20 premieres and festival exclusives. The 2026 program is organised around the theme A Whole New World, with immersive , artificial intelligence and digital storytelling used to reconsider familiar places across the city.
For and design audiences, the most compelling part of the festival is not only what is being presented, but where it is happening. The Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne Town Hall, Hamer Hall and the Birrarung are not neutral backdrops; their scale, history and spatial character are worked directly into the program.
At the Royal Exhibition Building, SOMNIA will invite audiences to spend the night beneath the dome for a durational sleep concert by American composer William Basinski and Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske. It is a rare chance to experience the building outside its familiar rhythm, with bodies at rest beneath one of Melbourne’s most recognisable while ambient sound unfolds through the night.
The venue will also host a program dedicated to Philip Glass, with Orchestra Victoria performing In the Upper Room and pianist Maki Namekawa presenting the composer’s Piano Etudes. Elsewhere in the building, The Breath Haus will lead a live breathwork and sound bath ritual featuring David and Daniel Wilfred of the narrm-based ensemble Hand to Earth. Together, sleeping, listening and breathing become ways of reading the architecture’s volume, acoustics and monumental scale.
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Along the Birrarung, a free sequence of large light will reshape the river after dark. Taiwanese artist AKA Chang’s Multimmersion 浸漬的( )線 Upside Down V2 will use laser light and reflection to construct a work across the water, while Emily Parsons-Lord’s The Falls Before Us will envelop Evan Walker Bridge in mist, making a familiar piece of appear to dissolve.
At Hamer Hall, Jess Johnson and Simon Ward’s XYZZY REDUX will cover the lower façade with an immersive digital hallucination. The projection sits somewhere between surface treatment and temporary architecture, altering the presence of the building without physically changing it.
Melbourne Town Hall will become another major festival site. Chunky Move premieres Time Remaining, combining bodies, lasers and light in a new work, while Robin Fox’s PRESENCE will fill the Main Hall with an audiovisual environment developed specifically with the building in mind. Fox will also premiere the work in its full concert form as part of a late-night program with MY DISCO, Jeho Yun and Kyoungjin So. For Fox, PRESENCE is less a fixed composition than an idea capable of moving between large-scale installations and intimate performances. Its constant is the need for an audience to encounter it physically.
“I love that my work can’t really be enjoyed remotely,” he says. “The Now or Never commission has provided an amazing context for the first iteration of this work.”
When Now or Never Artistic Director Elise Peyronnet proposed Melbourne Town Hall, Fox was immediately drawn to the Main Hall’s unusual volume. “The space is cavernous and carved up in interesting ways between the balconies, the grand organ and the ornate chandeliers,” he says. “What struck me most, though, was the volume of negative space, particularly the height, which is really exciting when thinking about a laser installation.”
Fox has presented work everywhere from punk squats and pubs to concert halls, cathedrals and outdoor settings, often without choosing the venue himself. Each new location requires the work to be reconsidered through its acoustics, scale, surfaces and safety constraints. When mapping a laser work, Fox may target hundreds of individual beams around a room, making decisions quickly and intuitively. “It’s at this point of the process that the space is my collaborator,” he says.
At other moments, the architecture reveals itself without being mapped at all. A plane of laser light scanning across an ornate surface can expose details and topographies that otherwise recede from view. Sound works differently but no less spatially, responding to the particular resonances of each room.
“Filling a space with sound and light can simultaneously utterly transform it and reveal its essence,” says Fox. “A well-designed sound that plays with the space in an interesting way can make architecture more somatic somehow. You can feel it more.”
One of the more unusual works at Town Hall is Revivification, a sound and sculptural installation that attempts to extend the creative life of experimental composer Alvin Lucier using his biological material. Outside, Korean artists Jung Haejung and HKASON will occupy the forecourt with a video installation and kinetic sculpture presented in partnership with Arts Korea Lab.
While light and sound are central to the festival, the program extends into lectures and conversations about the cultures shaping digital life. At the State Library Victoria, sexual historian Mindy Seu will present A Sexual History of the Internet, while technology critic Cory Doctorow examines the decline of online platforms through his widely used concept of “enshittification”.
Derrick Gee will bring a live edition of Radio Hour to the program with musician Julia Jacklin and record label founder Michael Kucyk, while First Nations Futures brings together Axel Garay, April Philips and Allara Briggs Pattison to discuss the role of storytelling, visual language and creative resistance in imagining new worlds.
Now or Never will also continue its collaboration with ACMI through Feng Mengbo’s video game installation Long March: Restart. Returning events include Library Up Late at State Library Victoria, Friday Night Social at Science Gallery Melbourne, Queer PowerPoint at Fed Square and an extended reality program presented with the Melbourne International Film Festival.
Fox sees that temporary transformation of civic space as more than spectacle. Public art festivals, he argues, allow people to encounter familiar buildings and streets differently, while creating shared experiences that cannot be reproduced remotely. “By transforming public space in magical ways, they install a sense of possibility for new ways of being in the built environment and thinking about the built environment,” he says.
There is a lot competing for attention across the 12-day program, but the architectural premise remains clear. Now or Never asks what happens when the spaces that organise civic life are occupied differently: when an exhibition hall becomes a place to sleep, a bridge disappears into weather, a concert hall becomes a moving image and a town hall is overtaken by light and sound.
Now or Never
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