From 6 to 23 June, the festival will showcase everything from virtual reality, radioactive art and deafening noise to experimental pop, electro-ballads, cult black metal leading up to the solstice night, and return to the light. 

The program for the three week event was released on Friday. 

Returning favorites include Night Mass, a 3000 person debaucherous multi-venue art party, and the City of Hobart Winter Feast, which will see Tasmania's wintry gastronomical heart beat again for eight nights across two weekends at Princes Wharf and Salamanca Place. 

Annual festival rituals of the Ogoh-Ogoh fear purging, parade and burning, and the Nude Solstice Swim, which will see over 1000 brave participants welcome the sun after the longest night of the year, will also return. 

New elements to the festival this winter include the branching into new venues, such as the former Forestry Tasmania building on Melville Street, the old Hobart Blood Bank and Merchant Store on Collins Street, the old Mercury building and the old Davey Street Congregational Church. 

The festival will also take to the waters of the River Derwent, with Dark Mofo's own Cold Ibiza dance party taking sail aboard a floating natural wine and food bar across two weekends.

Australian performance artist Mike Parr, who was buried under Macquarie Street for three days for his work Underneath the Bitumen the Artist during last year's festival, is a program highlight. 

After what the artist thought would be his final performance at last year's festival, Mr Parr will show a new work disoriented by Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915).

On Friday, June 7, the audience will witness a live video feed of a performance featuring a blindfolded Mr Parr in an undisclosed location, navigating a bare gallery space with brush and black paint.

The location will later be revealed and open as an exhibition for a short time, before the walls are painted and returned to their original state. 

Associate artistic director Jarrod Rawlins said an important point of difference for Dark Mofo is the scale and quality of its visual art program, and the reach this program has across age groups and demographics. 

"We need to create an experience of a safe but unexpected nature, something that is not designed to shock you, but is definitely designed to poke gently at your curiosity and life experiences," Mr Rawlins said. 

"It is designed to make you wonder, in moments that are unfamiliar, unconventional, and unexpected, combined with moments that are simply beautiful and fun."

Associate creative director Hannah Fox said it seems they have put together the most unlikely program we could have dreamed up. 

"It just evolved that way. Intentionally or otherwise, the artists in our seventh festival have become connected through emerging themes of simulated, mediated and real violence, extinction and the supernatural," Ms Fox said. 

"The music program is huge and layered, reaching from subversive electronic protest music from Sao Paulo, to intricate future-gospel out of Alabama, and Blixa Bargeld returning on a standing invitation to visit the southern isle every year until he dies."

The festival's musical line-up includes the world premiere of Costume's debut album, Pan, recorded in Reykjavik at the iconic Greenhouse Studios.

The full program and tickets are available on the Dark Mofo website.

Pre-sale subscriber tickets go on sale on Monday, 15 April at 6pm.

Non-subscriber tickets go on sale Tuesday, 16 April at 12pm.