Spreading art and design inspiration across the globe for 11 years, Semi-Permanent will return to Sydney with a swag of fascinating creative overachievers. After a decade of motivating audiences with talks, workshops and exhibitions, it’s no surprise that Semi-Permanent has gone global and is now recognised around the world as a leading forum where creative philosophies are shared. We grabbed a quick chat with Semi-Permanent’s co-founder, Andrew Johnstone, to discuss the festival’s beginnings and upcoming highlights planned for Sydney.
– most memorable
– most shocking
– brought a tear to your eye
– a true inspiration
– most unexpected
My personal choice for all of the above would be one speaker, Australian photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson. He showed some amazing work from his time shooting conflict photos in Iraq and Afghanistan and had the whole crowd in tears when showing a series of shots featuring the bedrooms of soldiers who had been killed in Iraq. It was one presentation that I’ll never forget.
If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice for the first Semi-Permanent, what would it be?
Don’t try and give 2,000 people a free t-shirt as they’ll all want to correct size (understandably) and end up making the registration queue well over 500metres long. It was a little hectic.
You just held the inaugural LA and Portland Semi-Permanent events. How’d they go?
They both went really well and it was a lot of fun running the events there. Both had their own challenges but ultimately the global message of the event – inspiration and creativity – was embraced by both cities and everyone seemed to really enjoy the speakers and the community feel that the event provides.
Tell us about some of the speaker highlights for Sydney 2013.
I’m personally very keen to see Finbarr O’Reilly, a photojournalist who has done a lot of work throughout Africa. I’m also looking forward to having Aaron Rose and Brian Roettinger up on stage together. Aaron moderated a session in LA which was really great so I’m keen to see what they come up with for Sydney.
Where can people buy tickets and when is the early bird ticket deadline?
People can purchase tickets on www.semipermanent.com or give us a call. The early bird deadline is this Friday 26 April.
Tell us about the concept behind your new offshoot of Semi, +20.
+20 is born out of the idea to give a mix of people, regardless of age, stage of career and genre of skill the opportunity to connect and collaborate one on one with top level creatives; to get ideas flowing, with the hope that they grow into bigger ideas, or at least a better perspective and confidence to go forth with. We teamed up with Google on this project which, at present, takes the form of a workshop. We held the first one in Los Angeles, and the follow up in Sydney will happen two days before Semi-Permanent. Submissions are open until Friday 10 May so anyone interested across graphic design, UI & UX, Illustration, photography, architecture, motion graphics, animation, and even music can put in an application here.
Semi-Permanent hits the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, May 24 & 25.
The lineup includes:
Alleged Press’ Aaron Rose, Los Angeles
Moving Picture Company, London
Artist Brian Roettinger, Los Angeles
Director Steve Ayson, Los Angeles
Photographer & Publisher Max Doyle, Sydney
Saturdays NYC, New York
Photographer Finbar O’Reilly, Senegal
Stab Publishing, Sam Macintosh, Sydney
March Studio Architectural firm Rodney Eggleston & Anne-Laure Cavigneaux, Melbourne
More to be announced…
