Coffee and Pastries Pitstop
Building 78
Take a break and recharge! From 10am enjoy delicious free coffee and fresh pastries in Building 78, provided by Little Bang Espresso. This cozy, quiet zone offers the perfect escape from the hustle and bustle of the festival. Whether you're looking to relax, refuel, or simply enjoy some downtime, this spot is your go-to destination for a peaceful retreat.
Future Film Program
In partnership with the Environmental Film Festival
Timing: 11am - 4pm (duration of each film varies from 3-16 minutes)
These short films are presented in partnership with the Environmental Film Festival Australia and include speculative imaginings of the future from Türkiye, France and right here in Melbourne. Several films in the program have been created by RMIT students.
Enjoy the screenings! There isn’t any content unsuitable for children, but the films are more suited to an adult audience.
Films include:
- Future Film News: In 2054, a news broadcast overlooks the hard-earned utopia of Melbourne, but the stream is disrupted by a professor urging that things are not what they seem.
- Halfturn: The quiet and observant Dante explores the city of Melbourne in 2054, which curiously seems both new and old, foreign and familiar, hopeful and hopeless.
- Camping Armor: After a decades-long coma, a father reconvenes with his children to learn how the world has changed, and how the people have stayed the same.
- The Consultant: In a grim future where humanity’s resources have become scarce from greed, a couple is interrogated by a seemingly heartless adviser.
- Bad Seed: Seeking freedom from their stale, artificial lifestyles, two people explore the criminal underworld of fostering plantlife, an outlawed and long-forgotten part of society.
- Garments Against Waste: In a society full of garment waste, PhD student Rute Chaves explores the ways old clothes can be repurposed for an environmentally sound, community-focused future.
- Same-Same But Different: Discussing the dangers of modern ‘fast fashion’, Dr Georgia McCorkill shares her effort to create a sustainable, reusable fashion economy.
EcoQuest: Melbourne
Cardigan Street, near Building 94
10am – 6pm
Come and experience a unique tabletop game that brings the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to life, with a local twist! Players will roll dice, make strategic decisions, and encounter Melbourne-specific challenges and opportunities while learning more about how we can all contribute to a sustainable future.
The game is fun, engaging, and designed for all ages, making it perfect for families, friends, and anyone interested in sustainability. This is a free event.
Dynamic Forest, hosted by RMIT Centre of Digital Ecosystems (CODE)
Building 78
Timing: 10am - 4pm
The Dynamic Forest is an experiment in transforming mundane spaces into magical ones. Visitors encounter a familiar environment filled with local Victorian plants and wildlife that respond to their presence and movement.
A mashup of gaming technologies, projection mapping and industrial sensors has been adapted to embody people in a mixed reality - between the expanding urban and vulnerable nature.
Reworlding: Cardigan Commons, presented in collaboration with Regen Melbourne and supported by Melbourne International Games Week 2024.
Cardigan Street
10am – 6pm (as well as Sunday 6 October)
Building on five years of experimental urban play, RMIT’s future play lab presents a story-driven live action role play (LARP) where speculative fiction meets urban adventure at a village carnival! Step into the year 2050, where Naarm Melbourne has grown into a sprawling megacity grappling with climate change, societal shifts, and evolving technologies.
Reworlding is a two-day, street-wide immersive climate action game inviting participants to navigate this future. Players will shape the city’s regeneration by joining factions, gathering resources, solving puzzles, and working together on creative solutions to make our future community thrive. The game will run for two days, allowing players to build their own neighbourhood together while the street is closed for the event!
Find someone wearing an armband with a cryptic symbol and play along with being in the year 2050.
Pick up an action card from any of our activity booths and accept its invitation to play along.
For more information and to book tickets, click here.
Trashion!
Cardigan Street
Timing: 11am to 4pm
Explore the future of sustainable fashion through ‘trashion’: upcycled and wearable art!
We all know that fast fashion is not the way of the future. We currently produce clothes faster than we can recycle them, with millions of tonnes of textile waste headed to landfill each year. At the same time, manufacturers are grappling with ways to make their business more sustainable - so what better use for those rescued resources than new fashion!
Design and make your own wearable art with materials from the non-profit organisation Resource Rescue Inc.
Taco Truck
Service times: 11.30am - 5pm
Tacos are in your future! The Taco Tuck is parked on site at City North Fest. Rated as our city’s best taco’s, Taco Truck is part of Raph Rashid’s fleet of legendary food trucks; Beatbox Kitchen, Juanita Peaches and All-Day Donuts.
Midday Munch Hub
Building 78
Feeling hungry? Visit the Midday Munch Hub in Building 78 for a fresh and tasty free lunch provided by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. Starting from 12pm until everything is gone, we’re serving a variety of wraps, rolls, croissants, and juices to suit all tastes. With options for different dietary needs, it's the perfect spot to refuel and relax before heading back into the festival fun!
‘Boneless Appétit’ - Future Foods
Cardigan Street
Timing: 1pm to 3pm
Can the rising seas wrought by climate change bring us wildly delicious flavours?
Come taste the future and decide for yourself! Come taste test your future!
The year is 2074. Climate change has made things weird. Rain will fall hard, and wild floods will occur. The crops we have known and loved are diseased. Our reliance on the ocean and its inhabitants will become crucial as rising acidic sea laps around our feet.
On the menu? Jellyfish salad, and a new type of ultra processed food - the Seaweed Preangle.
City North Fest Performances throughout the day:
- The Hopefuls (roaming throughout the day): A whimsical roving puppet duo, Mr and Mrs Hopeful, and in the pram their sleeping grandbaby.
- VOW - Visible Older Women (roaming, 2.30-3.30pm): Armed with humble milk crate pedestals, VOW: Crate Women interrogates older women’s experiences in the civic realm - the seen and unseen.
- The Rubbish Collective (roaming, 12-1pm): The Rubbish Collective teases the imagination in costumes created by Clara MY Chan. These brightly coloured characters playfully travel the streets, drawing attention to the damaging impact of plastic rubbish on our environment.
- GODZ (1.30-1.45pm): Follow Cupid (the God of love), Hercules (the God of strength) and Dionysus (the God of wine) as they paint the scene of Ancient Greece and bring you to the biggest party to hit Mount Olympus since 500 BCE. GODZ are also appearing in Melbourne Fringe 2024
Pepper Robot
Building 78
Meet Pepper, SoftBank’s innovative humanoid robot designed to engage with humans in an engaging and natural way! Watch as Pepper performs a choreographed dance routine, showcasing its fluid movements, expressive gestures, and interactive features. This demo highlights Pepper's entertainment potential but also its versatility in various applications, from AI-oriented customer service to education. Visit Pepper in Building 78!
Projection: Ecological Encroachment
Wall opposite Building 78 from sunset, or from your device using the QR code below.
Ecological Encroachment is a projection installation that presents a speculative future where plants dominate and human life forms crumble.
Created using emergent technologies including mobile scanning devices, photogrammetry, motion capture, and 3D animation, the complex arrangement shifts between actual and imagined spaces.
The work merges human and plant life to present cross-species forms, proposing an evolutionary life form where we are one with the environment. This work investigates ecological shifts due to human impact and highlights our inherent trajectory in the new era of the Anthropocene
Arcade Launch
4 – 6pm, RMIT Building 78 (corner of Cardigan and Earl St)
At this launch hear newly unearthed site-specific stories of Melbourne from the grid to the drift, oysters to air, via subterranean sewers and bohemian hangouts. New technologies and traditional publishing practices come together to storify the city. Hear speculative insights on topics ranging from food to fine art as six authors in search of a city mine Melbourne’s Hidden histories.
