About
A Whole New World
Now or Never, City of Melbourne’s annual festival of art, ideas, sound, and technology, is seeking exciting projects for its 2026 edition.
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. In 2025 Now or Never attracted an audience of over 400,000 people and took over iconic city landmarks.
In 2026 artists and audiences are invited 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.
This is a moment of accelerated transformation. AI, immersive technologies, and digital tools are reshaping creativity, knowledge, and society itself. Now or Never seeks your big ideas in response: installations, interactive experiences, performances, digital art, sound projects – innovative concepts that can only happen in a festival context. Think subversive, playful, truly reimagining what’s possible.
Ready to showcase in August 2026 or need development time for 2027? Proposed projects must have an in-person, public outcome within the City of Melbourne during late August. The theme of A Whole New World and ‘technology’ can be interpreted as broadly as desired.
Selected projects receive presentation fees and festival support, which may include venue assistance, production help, marketing and access services, determined collaboratively based on project needs. Selection is competitive, with projects assessed on innovation, creative boundary-pushing, audience reach, and meaningful engagement with technology and future-focused ideas. Honouring over 2,000 generations of Aboriginal connection to Country, priority will be given to Aboriginal-led projects celebrating Indigenous innovation and creativity.
Applications close Friday 5 December, 5pm AEDT.
Sustainability
The future we envision demands action in the present. Now or Never has achieved carbon neutral certification under the Australian Government’s Climate Active Program for two consecutive years, tracking every source of emissions, from your journey to our spaces to the luminous installations that transform them and even the drinks you enjoy on site. $1 from every ticket sale of Now or Never produced event supports our sustainability initiatives, from carbon offsets to circular services that offer environmental stewardship and cultural preservation.
Our 2025 offsets will power hydro and landfill gas recovery initiatives, plus a land conservation project at Mount Sandy in South Australia. Here, iconic native species – short-beaked echidnas, purple-gaped honeyeaters, elegant parrots – find sanctuary in habitat managed by Ngarrindjeri elders, with revegetation sourced from Raukkan Aboriginal Community nursery. Through programmed works and dialogue, Now or Never explores how today’s sustainable acts become tomorrow’s possibilities.