Illuminate Adelaide reveals its 2026 program

This year's Illuminate Adelaide festival features a larger-than-life video game, a radiant woolly mammoth and even a smartphone choir.
Moment Factory's larger-than-life video games experience Augmented Games has been programmed for Illuminate Adelaide 2026. People watch on from the sides as participants step onto the boards of immersive, large-scale video games.

Illuminate Adelaide, the South Australian capital’s winter festival, has unveiled its 2026 program.

Highlights include Canadian company Moment Factory’s Augmented Games at Adelaide Showgrounds, a larger-than-life digital gaming experience in which participants step into the games as players rather than wielding controllers from the sidelines; Digital Abyss at Immersive Light and Arts, a new work bringing underwater ecosystems to life and created by French digital artist Miguel Chevalier, Illuminate Adelaide’s 2026 artist-in-residence; and the third and final chapter of Adelaide Zoo’s night-time exploration of prehistoric worlds, Universal Kingdom: Ice Age, featuring illuminated mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and their Australian megafauna equivalents such as diprotodon.

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Richard Watts OAM is ArtsHub's National Performing Arts Editor; he also presents the weekly program SmartArts on Three Triple R FM. Richard is a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, a Melbourne Fringe Festival Living Legend, and was awarded the 2019 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards' Facilitator's Prize in early 2020. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Green Room Awards Association in 2021, and a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in June 2024. Photo: Fiona Hamilton. Follow Richard on Bluesky @richardthewatts.bsky.social and Instagram @richard.l.watts