Now or Never electrifies the city after dark this August.
In the dying weeks of Melbourne’s winter, nights come alive with art, music, technology and wild ideas. Now or Never’s 2026 theme, A Whole New World, taps into our rapidly changing times and technological escalation, explored through 150 events with around 250 of the world’s greatest creatives and thinkers.
The river is transformed by free installations of sound and light, experimental music and electronic soundscapes fill our hallowed halls and we experience immersive, breathtaking encounters.
Great minds will talk about the future of AI and the sexual history of the internet, the lines between human and machine will blur and in the middle of life’s furious chaos we’ll slow time and find moments of calm – including an enormous musical sleepover.
Ready to electrify your senses? Here are our top picks for Now or Never’s most immersive nights.
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.
PRESENCE
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- 21 Aug — 27 Aug
- Melbourne Town Hall
Master of the laser arts and renowned electronic musician Robin Fox has dreamed a new installation into reality.
PRESENCE captivates with shifting audiovisual waves as the work pulses and soars through Town Hall. Synchronised laser projections and sound create an encompassing spectacle of new environments, textures and states of mind.
It’s the captivating sound and vision Fox’s shows and installations are famous for, the kind that holds you transfixed in a room, forgetting everything else. Just here, now, you and the shimmering lights.
PRESENCE is free throughout the festival, starting from 21 August (5pm-10pm) then 22-27 August (12pm-10pm). So you can walk in and be present as many times as you like.
Revivification
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- 21 Aug — 30 Aug
- Melbourne Town Hall – Swanston Hall
Can an artist keep creating after they’re gone? This confronting sound installation puts that question to the test, landing right in the middle of the festival’s ongoing conversation around human agency and generative AI.
Revivification is an attempt to posthumously extend the artistic life of experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who died in 2021 at age 90. Before his death, Lucier donated biological material and spent years collaborating with the team behind the work, knowing it would become the basis of a living installation long after he was gone.
Lucier spent his career redefining composition, turning attention away from performance and toward the physical properties of sound itself, working with brain waves, echolocation and acoustics in ways that blurred music, science and art together.
Here, his cells have been grown into cerebral organoids, or ‘mini-brains’, and their neural activity drives an ever-shifting sonic landscape. It’s part science experiment, part séance, and running most nights until 9pm or 10pm, it’s one of the festival’s most immersive sound experiences
Time Remaining
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- 19-20 August
- Melbourne Town Hall
Commissioned for Now or Never, this world premiere of Time Remaining from internationally celebrated Melbourne dance company Chunky Move blends dance and technology in a unique integrated performance.
Lasers pierce the dark and hit the body, scanning, tracking and slipping over the flesh. Motorised winches and scanning beams of light interweave with the movements of the dancers, both choreographed, drawing the audience into intense focus on these mechanical and organic bodies.
This work by Chunky Move Artistic Director Antony Hamilton is a collaboration with technical designers Nick Roux and Nicholas Moloney, transforming Town Hall into an immersive space of speculative, even unsettling visions of our world.
By holding tension between machine and human, the body and the watcher, synchronisation and resistance, it asks, who has agency in our techno-futures?
A Sexual History of the Internet
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- 25 Aug, 7:30pm — 9pm
- State Library Victoria – La Trobe Reading Room
Internet historian Mindy Seu leads a communal, participatory lecture performance tracing the tangled, often overlooked sexual and political origins of our digital tools. Expect a charged mix of desire and design, pleasure and control, intimacy and exploitation; the internet was never built on neutral ground, and neither is touch.
The work exists in two parts: a live lecture performance and a companion artist book, both digging into the same messy, hidden history of how our online world came to be.
The audience doesn’t just listen, citations are read aloud together via a shared script on mobile devices, turning the talk into a kind of collective ritual rather than a one-way lecture, with speaking and re-citation standing in for genuine exchange.
Staged inside State Library Victoria’s grand La Trobe Reading Room, the performance reshapes the cathedral-like space into something far more intimate and charged, as the room fills with the hum, chime and chant of shared voices; internet intimacy, made physical.
By the Yarra – Birrarung
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Who needs galleries when you have a whole river? Now or Never turns the Yarra into an outdoor artspace by night, with multiple installations dotted along the banks.
In Multimmersion 浸 漬 的 ( ) 線 Upside Down V2 by Taiwanese artist AKA Chang, technology meets nature when the river becomes a canvas and light projections scatter along the surface, creating mirror worlds and altering our perception.
The bridge becomes a signal from nature in Emily Parsons-Lord’s The Falls Before Us. A mist infused with methyl jasmonate (a plant stress-response hormone) enrobes the Evan Walker Bridge. Our urban structure becomes a glowing, sustained crisis call from the forests.
XYZZY REDUX sees the return of a much-lauded highlight from the 2023 festival. Artist Jess Johnson and video director Simon Ward have created a new hallucinatory video loop to be projected across the facade of Hamer Hall. Weird patterns of organic and geometric forms tumble endlessly from a hypnotic wormhole, accompanied by a synth score from Andrew Clarke, Luke Rowell, Stef Animal and Lachlan Anderson.
The river is alive with sounds and story for Transmissions at SIGNAL. The north bank of the Yarra becomes a stage for a shifting, changing projection piece where city and river connect with each other.
Audiovisual work Hyper Birrarung by Liwen Lian with Anh Tran is accompanied by speech and sound design from SIGNAL’s young artist commissions.
The Breath Haus x Now or Never
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- 22 August, 4:30pm-7pm
- Royal Exhibition Building
Need to slow down, find your centre and get in touch with yourself again? This is guided meditation, but not as you know it.
The Breath Haus has revolutionised breathwork experiences in Australia and earned a serious following for its blend of nervous system health science and traditional meditation techniques.
For Now or Never, they’ll lead a one-off 90-minute session of their transformative mindfulness practice.
Learn the art of conscious breathing, then Yolnu songmen Daniel and David Wilfred (Hand to Earth), violinist Bhairavi Raman, bassist Helen Svoboda and Peter Knight on the electronics and trumpet pull you into a deeper state of calm with the enchantment of music.
Whichever night you choose, one thing’s certain: Melbourne’s never looked, sounded or felt quite like this.
Now or Never runs across Melbourne from 19–30 August 2026, find the full program here.
Beat is a proud media partner of Now or Never.
