Semi-Permanent reveals stellar lineup for its Never Permanent festival in Melbourne

Working as a creative professional is great, but now and again, you need to get away from your desk and recharge your batteries. And what better way than attending a creative event? You'll get a burst of inspiration from the industry's leading practitioners, network with people pursuing a similar discipline, and keep up with all the latest trends and developments in this fast-changing industry.

If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, we recommend (if you haven't already) checking out Semi-Permanent. As the biggest and longest-running event of its kind in the lower half of the planet, Semi Permanent shares insight into the processes of the world's leading visionaries and ignites connection, conversation, collaboration and creativity.

And if you like the sound of that, you don't have to wait long! Semi-Permanent has just announced the launch of a new event for Melbourne this August, and it features a stellar lineup of speakers, from director and screenwriter Roman Coppola to Joshua To, VP of Design at Meta.

When and where

Part of the City of Melbourne's Now or Never festival, Never Permanent is a full-day program of keynote talks and panel discussions that will explore and celebrate the rich and ever-changing intersection of creativity and technology to inspire new ways of thinking. It takes place at the beautiful Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, on Thursday 24 August and brings together an audience of 1,000 creatively attuned attendees from across Asia-Pacific.

At a time when new developments like AI, AR and VR are shaking up all our jobs, Never Permanent will specifically focus on how technology is reshaping the industry and the challenges and opportunities it presents.

And whatever field you work in, Never Permanent has you covered, with speakers representing multiple fields, including filmmaking, photography, graphic, product and motion design, animation, music, Web3 and the metaverse, and visual data. You can buy tickets here.

The Royal Exhibition Building, venue for the event, is a worth a visit by itself!

Who's speaking?

Here's the full speaker lineup for the day in alphabetical order:

Angie Abdilla: founder, Old Ways, New, Sydney
Jesse Woolston: multimedia artist and composer, Los Angeles
Joshua To: vice-president of product design, AR & Wearables, Meta, San Francisco
Justin Ridler: photographer and filmmaker, Melbourne
Mindy Seu: designer and technologist, New York City
Nicholas Kamuda: product designer, Meta, Seattle
Roman Coppola: director, screenwriter and producer, Los Angeles
Serwah Attafuah: a multidisciplinary artist and musician, Sydney
Ta-ku: recording artist, photographer and creative director, Perth

Now read on to learn more details about each of these fantastic speakers!

Roman Coppola

Roman Coppola is a director, screenwriter, producer, and inventor. The son of famed director Francis Ford Coppola, Roman has played an integral part in countless film projects, including second-unit work, producing, and co-writing.

He's often collaborated with Wes Anderson on projects, including the upcoming Asteroid City, The French Dispatch, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Darjeeling Limited, and Moonrise Kingdom, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

He also frequently works with his sister, Sofia Coppola, on such projects as On the Rocks, Marie Antoinette, Lost in Translation, and The Virgin Suicides.

Coppola is president of pioneering independent production company American Zoetrope, founder and owner of award-winning commercial and music video production company The Directors Bureau, and founder of the revolutionary blockchain-based film community, Decentralized Pictures.

Mindy Seu

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City, currently teaching as an assistant professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions.

Mindy's ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded a Graham Foundation Grant.

Ta-ku

Ta-ku is a multidisciplinary artist from Perth, Australia, of Filipino-Maori heritage. Having risen to prominence as one of the world's most in-demand beatmakers, he has found himself curator of a rapidly expanding creative empire. Ta-ku now works on a diverse range of passion projects that encompass creative direction, photography, videography, design, business and fashion. His first full solo album, Songs To Come Home To, will be launched at Never Permanent.

Joshua To: Vice-president of design, AR & Wearables, Meta, San Francisco

Joshua To is a VP of Design at Meta and currently leads the AR & Wearables Design team. This includes Meta's Glasses as well as the rest of its Wearables portfolio. He is directly responsible for ensuring that Meta's products ship with the highest quality and offer the best user experience.

Joshua has always been interested in building extraordinary things across the intersection of design, entrepreneurship and technology. In his spare time, he's the founder of non-profits WellDone International and Soup, where he plays an active role. Before joining Meta in 2021, he was a design leader at Google and spearheaded the Google AR, AR Platform, Lens and Wearables.

Angie Abdilla

Professor Angie Abdilla is a founder and director of Old Ways, New in Sydney. A palawa woman, she also co-founded the Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence working group (IP//AI).

Angie is a professor at the Australian National University's School of Cybernetics, a member of the CSIRO Data61 Advisory Group, the 'Diversity and Inclusion in AI' National AI Centre Think Tank, and a member of the Global Futures Council on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity as part of the World Economic Forum in 2022.

Jesse Woolston

An artist from Auckland based in Los Angeles, Jesse Woolston, uses a multimedia approach of visual and auditory arts supported by science and the aesthetics of nature. His work articulates natural phenomena through simulation and sound and how we experience the balance between positive and negative emotions.

Soundtracked by his own musical works, which are indebted to an electronic and contemporary classical nature, his international installations create a rigorous and captivating multi-sensory integrated experience.

Justin Ridler

Justin Ridler blends traditional photography with modern technology to create works that merge the virtual and physical worlds. He collaborates with leading creatives in advertising, choreography, fine art, and fashion, pushing boundaries and earning recognition as a Changemaker by Australian Fashion Week in 2021.

Justin has been featured in prestigious publications such as Vogue China, Vogue US, Vogue UK, and Vogue France. His noteworthy collaborations include Virgil Abloh, Baz Luhrmann, Toni Maticevski, and Margaret Zhang, cementing his status as a pioneering multidisciplinary artist.

Serwah Attafuah

Serwah Attafuah is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based in West Sydney, Australia. She creates surreal cyber dreamscapes and heavenly wastelands populated by Afro-futuristic abstractions of self with strong ancestral and contemporary themes.

Serwah has collaborated with and been commissioned by many big-name clients, including Mercedes Benz, Nike, GQ, Adobe, Paris Hilton and Charli XCX. Recent notable achievements include her participation in Sotheby's 'Natively Digital': A Curated NFT auction and 'Apotheosis': a live-motion capture experience with Soft Centre at The Sydney Opera House.