Semi Permanent 2022: Everything you need to see at the design experience festival
A unique, world-renowned Australian festival returns this month, celebrating those visionary artists and designers ‘making the world a better and more interesting place’.
When Semi Permanent last staged its flagship festival – an event that Australian artists and creators working at the cutting edge of tech and experience design consider a fixture on the yearly calendar – the theme was “Restless”.
That was back in May 2019 and it turned out to be eerily prescient given that, for many, the time since has been encumbered by an extraordinary sense of frustration and restlessness. “We picked that one pretty well,” reflects Murray Bell, creative director and founder of Semi Permanent, the globally renowned Australian-based experience design company.
This wasn’t the first time Bell had been ahead of the curve (and it’s unlikely to be the last).
Although he prefers to stay behind the scenes (his interview with The Australian marks a rare outing for a profile that highlights him, as opposed to one of his festival attendees or clients), Bell has become a revered curator and brand genius.
Critical to his enduring success is his sixth sense for singling out the people and ideas that are destined to shape the way we live, work and think. For 20 years, he’s been bringing them together to speak at his festival, celebrating creativity in art, tech and the spaces in between.
For example, if you’d gone to a Semi Permanent a few years ago, you’d have heard a talk on user experience that explored how design techniques were transitioning out of film special effects and gaming and into the everyday media that we hold in the palm of our hands.
Go back even further, and one of the first names on Semi Permanent’s inaugural bill was the elusive British graffiti artist Banksy.
“That was before Banksy was Banksy,” says Sydney-born Bell. “I met him online through my first design blog. When we decided to host an event, he was one of the first people we asked to come.”
After a two year hiatus, the Semi Permanent festival will return to its hometown of Sydney later this month, when it takes over the Carriageworks precinct as part of Vivid Sydney.
Included in the eclectic line-up: Renowned Dutch photographers Inez & Vinoodh, Meta technology strategy director Jason Juma-Ross, New York-based fashion-turned-furniture designer Jonathan Saunders, emerging Western Sydney artist Serwah Attafuah, and the team behind all-female filmmaking collective Dollhouse Pictures.
The event’s tentpole talks program, which features an impressive line-up of speakers across tech and design, music, architecture and more, will take place alongside an art book fair called “Permanent”. Performances, exhibitions and experiential activations will also run across the week (many are free to attend).
It comes after three separate attempts to deliver the 2021 festival were thwarted by Covid. But Bell doesn’t appear rattled by the cancellations.
That is because Semi Permanent isn’t just an ideas festival. Since launching 20 years ago, the company has expanded to house an in-demand branding studio. It’s also established itself as a world leader in experience design, which is a cerebral label for events that bridge the sensation of physical experiences with the digital realm.
It makes sense then, that demand for Bell’s services skyrocketed during the pandemic. Since February 2020, the Semi Permanent team has grown from four to 14 staff; Google, Nike, National Geographic and the Olympic Games Committee are among the global mega-brands Semi Permanent has produced work for in recent years.
But the company, which launched its first Middle East festival in Abu Dhabi last year (where megastar DJ and producer Mark Ronson appeared), sprung from much humbler beginnings. In fact, its origins lie in the insatiable curiosity of a young surfer, from the South Sydney hamlet of Cronulla, who was born partially deaf.
“I had a lot of operations, it sort of corrected itself,” says Bell with a chuckle. “But I think it influenced the way I saw things, because my senses were a little bit askew.”
As a teenager, travel became Bell’s form of escapism – his parents were going through a divorce, and chasing waves around the world was a good distraction.
“I was about 18 or 19, and I was meeting all of these new people. I’m a pretty curious person, and I’m not afraid to ask uncomfortable questions, or obvious questions,” Bell recalls.
“I realised pretty soon that creativity and design were things that people were genuinely interested in talking about.
“The way it brings people together from all over the world felt like such a rich experience.”
Around the turn of the century, Bell travelled to America to speak on behalf of his first design blog – the one he connected with Banksy through – which was appropriately titled Design is Kinky. While there, Bell says he was hit with the realisation that in, the future, the way we communicate was going to become very digital. “That sounds bleedingly obvious now,” he says, laughing. But Bell didn’t rush to invest in the early internet. Instead, he pushed further in the opposite direction.
“It made me think that bringing people together, physically, was going to become this really valuable thing. The fact everything was moving online was going to make human connection even more important.”
And so the seeds of Semi Permanent were sewn. Bell went on to work as an art director for indie magazines like fashion tome Dazed & Confused and surfing bible Stab Mag, while running his ideas festival on the side. The original concept was simple: A physical gathering where artists and thinkers would come together to discuss design.
Interesting people began to take notice. Filmmakers Roman, Francis Ford and Gia Coppola, pro surfer Kelly Slater, pro skater Tony Hawk and director Miranda July were among some of Semi Permanent’s early supporters.
A natural-born networker, Bell still keeps in touch with most of his collaborators. “I would just drop them an email and say, ‘I really like what you’re doing.’”
Today, Semi Permanent has found its niche connecting global brands and world-class talent with receptive audiences through its boutique and large-scale events.
This formula might not sound particularly groundbreaking. But Bell’s knack for finding untold stories behind well-known stories, and elevating them appropriately, is what makes Semi Permanent’s events so buzzy. “About 15 years ago I reached out to Radiohead. I said to them, ‘I love what you guys do, and I think there’s stories about your creative work that go beyond the music that haven’t necessarily been told,’” explains Bell. At Semi Permanent Sydney 10 years later, a retrospective exhibition that told the Radiohead story through 2500 works by the group’s resident artist Stanley Donwood was launched.
Donwood was responsible for the brand’s most iconic album covers, OK Computer (1997) and In Rainbows (2007) among them. This was his first retrospective. It was soundtracked by a bespoke composition created by frontman Thom Yorke especially for the exhibition.
The 2022 Semi Permanent line-up is just as intriguing. You might not know every name on it. But if you’re interested in typography, fashion, the metaverse or filmmaking, you’ll recognise an overwhelming number of projects these people have brought to life.
This was the intention of Mitchell Oakley Smith, who joined Semi Permanent as its global creative director in 2021.
“With these events, I often think the most interesting people on stage are the ones you’ve never heard of,” says the author and former magazine editor. “You might come because you want to listen to Paul Cournet, who’s this amazing architect that does the set design for Prada’s fashion shows. But then you stay in the audience and hear from someone you didn’t expect to, and you walk away with a completely new appreciation of their field. I like that element of surprise.”
On the topic of surprises, satirical Australian news outlet Betoota Advocate feels like an anomaly among the list of esteemed architects and musicians. But the theme of this year’s festival is “Perspective” and Oakley Smith is fascinated by the way the platform forces us to question what is and isn’t real.
“I think their perspective on the news, and the way they’re growing … is really quite interesting.”
Elsewhere, attendees will have the chance to hear from Sam Elsom, who pivoted from a career in fashion to founding Sea Forest, an organisation with farms in Tasmania that produce commercial volumes of Asparagopsis seaweed to sequester CO2 and reverse climate change. Illustrator turned creative director Aries Moross, whose art directed album campaigns for musicians like Kylie Minogue and One Direction, will also share their secrets to success.
As will Australian artist Nick Thomm, whose privately commissioned pieces include a large-scale mural for Miley Cyrus’ Los Angeles home. “The program really talks to this idea that creativity isn’t linear,” says Oakley Smith. “It can be applied to anything to make the world a better and more interesting place.”
Will this year’s festival uphold the Semi Permanent tradition of setting the global creative agenda while platforming the next big names in creativity and design?
Oakley Smith nods to the most recent Coachella line-up. “So many of the people that have worked on those film clips, album covers, art direction and merchandise … I think they’re some of the most interesting people in the creative process.”
It’s no accident that a handful of them are set to speak at Semi Permanent this month.
Semi Permanent will run from May 25 to 27 at Carriageworks, Sydney.