Screen time: AGI Open’s Liza Enebeis on creating living artworks in our cities

DEMO's Liza Enebeis at Rotterdam's central train station, with one of 5000 screens throughout the Netherlands that took part in a "design in motion" exhibition.

THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW

Next week, 30 of the world’s leading designers will be in Auckland for the Alliance Graphique Internationale’s AGI Open. Liza Enebeis, creative director of Dutch design agency Studio Dunbar/DEPT®, talks about her digital mission to take over the world.

Our office here in Rotterdam is in the former Central Post Building, right next to the main railway station. We’re on the 13th floor, with almost a 360-degree view of the city. You can even see further, as far as The Hague. I mean, the Netherlands is a very small country.

The studio I’m part of is 45 years old and has designed identities for some very iconic brands. Until the 90s it was static. It was print, a big sign on a building. With digital technology, the medium has changed. So you need to change the way you work or you will be limited not only in your ideas but how and where you communicate.

All the time, we are bombarded with messages on our screens, not just on our phones but on screens that are popping up everywhere now filled with advertising — a sort of digital canvas. What is put out there has a big influence on how we feel, how we are as people and how other people see us. In Rotterdam, a lot of the public advertising is about this as a place where things happen. It feels like a city that is really emerging and has energy in it.

At our studio, we see beautiful work from motion designers all around the world and we wanted to create an exhibition to show it publicly. In 2019, an open call was held and entries were received from more than 70 countries. For us, it was important not to have the exhibition in a closed space. So we partnered with a company that owns all the Dutch Railways screens and for 24 hours, DEMO [Design in Motion Festival] took over 80 screens in Amsterdam Central Station.

It was such an unbelievable experience. Imagine walking into a space where screens that always show ads suddenly turn off and are filled with art. It’s like a living museum where you can change the exhibition every 10 minutes. Then, of course, we had Covid and all went to bed. But being in quarantine, you start imagining. You start hallucinating. Maybe we can make this idea bigger. If you can take over a train station, what if we take over a whole country?

This time, we got 13 screen partners involved: all the metro stations, our three airports, city centres, petrol stations, shopping malls. Last November, from 6am to midnight, DEMO 2022 took over 5000 screens, showing 800 pieces of work from 90 countries. A few were recorded videos but the majority of the work was graphic. Some had a sense of humour, some were more ambient, playing with colour and textures. We also showed generative work, using AI to really push the limits in an unexpected way.

In September 2024, our intention is to take DEMO worldwide. That’s the dream. We’ve already organised exhibitions in Italy, in France. We’ve had interest from Cairo. Just before Covid, it was planned to be held in Norway. There’s not a lot of sunlight there, especially in the winter months.

That has an effect on people, with many cases of depression, so part of the idea was to generate light.

We think of these digital screens as having living artworks in your city. Even if they’re used for advertising later, the people who create those ads — or us, as designers — can take this into consideration and think maybe there’s another way to show this, instead of just, “Buy this shoe now.”

— As told to Joanna Wane

*Liza Enebeis, creative director of the international design agency Studio Dunbar/DEPT®, artist Paula Scher from Pentagram New York (subject of the recent Netflix series Abstract — the Art of Design) and Kenya Hara, design director of the Japanese brand Muji, will be among the speakers at the AGI Open at the Aotea Centre, September 18-19. The largest design event ever held in Auckland, it’s being hosted in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time. The programme includes a special exhibition at Objectspace.

See agi-open.com