DEMO Festival
DEMO Festival takes motion design out of the screen in your hand and puts it on the screens of the public realm. Founded by Studio Dumbar/DEPT® and Global, it has grown into what it calls the world’s largest motion design festival. Its 2022 edition turned more than 5,000 digital screens across the Netherlands into a 24-hour open-air exhibition, with train stations, motorways, airports and shopping centres all showing the same program.
I first came to DEMO in 2022 as a participating artist. Their vision and ambitions, alongside execution, was inspiring.. Putting 815 works by 487 designers from 54 countries into everyday public space is hard to pull off.
For the 2025 Cities Edition, DEMO brought that ambition to a global set of cities. I collaborated with the DEMO team to help realize in Vancouver. To do that, I founded EON (Experiments in Optical Narratives), a collective of five curators who selected and shaped the work for five LED walls across downtown Vancouver. The walls were part of a program that reached millions of viewers worldwide, drawn from 5,400 submissions from 92 countries.
Working on DEMO sits right at the center of what I care about: technology as a way to bring art into the rhythm of everyday city life, and giving artists a stage that people can’t avoid walking into.
