Melbourne's winter calendar has one more late night left in it. Now or Never, the City of Melbourne's festival of art, ideas, sound and technology, returns from 19 to 30 August with more than 150 events, experiences and installations and around 250 local and international artists.
This year's theme is "A Whole New World", and the program leans hard into it. The festival is built around the ways immersive technologies, artificial intelligence and digital storytelling are reshaping how we experience art, knowledge and each other — less a survey of shiny gadgets than an argument about what those tools are doing to the way we pay attention.
The headline act is one you can sleep through, deliberately. Somnia pairs composer William Basinski with saxophonist Bendik Giske for an overnight sleep concert beneath the dome of the Royal Exhibition Building, where Basinski performs the Disintegration Loops and Giske adds a solo turn — ambient music shaped live, for an audience that has come to lie down rather than applaud.
The same venue hosts a tribute to a very different composer. Philip Glass: In the Upper Room marks that composer's legacy, with Orchestra Victoria and pianist Maki Namekawa performing his piano etudes under the same roof.
Outside, the festival spills onto the water. Free public installations will transform the Yarra River, the Birrarung, with projections, light works, mist interventions and interactive experiences. Among them are Aka Chang's reflective laser piece Multimmersion and Emily Parsons-Lord's The Falls Before Us, in which the Evan Walker Bridge disappears into mist.
Beyond the Royal Exhibition Building, the program takes in Melbourne Town Hall and stretches along the river. Ticket prices vary and bookings run through the festival website, but a decent slice of the program — the public installations and a range of other events — is free to walk up to, which is how a festival like this earns its crowds on a cold night.
Now or Never has carved out a particular niche in a crowded events calendar: a festival that treats technology as a medium rather than a gimmick, and that is quite happy to keep the city up well past its bedtime. For a fortnight in August, a nineteenth-century dome becomes the strangest room in town.
