Now Or Never Festival 2026

Now Or Never Festival

Round out your winter with Now or Never, on from 28 to 30 August 2026.

This huge city-wide festival celebrates art, ideas, sound and technology.

Explore an epic program of boundary-pushing performances, mind-blowing installations, free interactive experiences and heaps more.

An exploration of potential futures through a carefully curated program of pioneering audio and visual art, performance, visionary thinkers, digital culture, and commissioned work.

A Festival of New Dimensions

Now or Never is City of Melbourne's annual festival of art, ideas, sound, and technology. Transforming Melbourne / narrm with sonic and visual experiences, cutting-edge performance, and thought-provoking talks, Now or Never is a citywide festival where ground-breaking creativity meets untethered exploration. The city becomes a canvas for boundary-pushing artists, changemakers and innovators - inviting audiences to experience Melbourne in a different way.

We are living in a moment of accelerated transformation. Waves of hype around immersive technologies, video games and AI are reshaping the way we understand knowledge, creativity, and our place in society. These shifts are not only technological, they are cultural, reframing the stories we tell, the games we play, and the ways we imagine futures together.

At the heart of this lies worldbuilding: the art of constructing shared realities, whether through speculative fiction, virtual landscapes, or collaborative artistic encounters. Once the domain of literature and fantasy, worldbuilding has become a pervasive cultural practice, shaping video games, cinema, digital platforms, and even the way communities imagine themselves.

For Now or Never 2026, we invite artists and audiences to cross the threshold into A Whole New World. This is where installation meets performance, technology merges with ritual, and reality blurs with imagination, offering glimpses of alternative futures, whilst challenging the status quo of our time.

Explore this year's program spanning Art, Ideas, Sound, and Technology with free and ticketed events.

Explore Program