Experimental Jetset

For a while now, Amsterdam-based graphic design unit Experimental Jetset has been exploring the language of diagrams, city maps, time tables, and clock dials. But instead of using this diagrammatic language in an objective, empirical way, EJ tries to employ this language in a more intuitive, poetic manner. For EJ, diagrams are ultimately open plans, spatial constructions that could (and should) be interpretable in multiple ways.

On the subject of their billboard, Experimental Jetset says: “City maps in public spaces often contain the indication ‘You Are Here’, usually accompanied by an arrow. When you think of it, that’s quite an existential message. We thought we could emphasize this sense of existentialism even more, by adding a second phrase: ‘You Are Now’. Because that’s ultimately where we all are: here and now”.

Added to that, Experimental Jetset’s billboard is also a reworking of a scientific diagram found in a publication from 1927 (‘The Nature of the Physical World’, by Arthur Stanley Eddington).



Billboard framework: Olivier Goethals
Photography: Michiel De Cleene

This billboard is a collaboration between Design museum Gent and 019. It functions as an alternative exhibition platform for (graphic) designers. A leftover from the Museum Of Moving Practice project that happend between the 18th of May and the 17th of September 2017, where 019 temporary occupied a part of the museum. This billboard is a copy of the Billboard Series framework that has been hanging at 019 since September 2015. (A project by artlead, All Things Contemporary Vzw & 019.) Each billboard stays up for two months. The designers are selected by 019.