The inevitable 2012 Pictoplasma theme, Doomsday, inspired us to ask Sehsucht to tell a story around a Macy’s Day parade full of twisted characters. Far from the gloom and doom which usually goes along end of day stories, their creatures invade a vacant city and make it their own.
Director: Mate Steinforth
Art Direction: Philipp Brömme, Christian Zschunke, Julius Brockelmann
Music & Sound Design: David Kamp
To celebrate the 2011 Festival with a worthy Opener, Pictoplasma produced a dreamy, immersive video featuring the event’s main hosts, “The Missing Link”…
Production / Direction: Pictoplasma
Director of Photography: Kalle Klein
Choreography: Jared Gradinger
Costume Design: Werkstattkollektiv
Music: Leyland Kirby
Open to the most daring, stylistically sure-footed character exhibition proposals, unlimited to any media or style, the annual Pictoplasma Residency in cooperation with DISK/CTM offers young and upcoming artists the opportunity to present their character driven work to a wide, international and interested audience.
As part of the official Character Walk, a renown project space in the center of Berlin serves as the perfect stage for the winning proposal. The awarded artist receives free accommodation, a financial grant to help realize the submitted proposal, and support to set up the exhibition in the “General Public” - as well as free entry to all of the Pictoplasma Festival and Conference events.
Previous Pictoplasma artists in residency:
Melissa Godoy Nieto
Creaturas del 2012 Doppeldenk
Selected Works Michal Dabrowski
Heroes Of Might And Maybe Gediminas Šiaulys
Pagan Lullaby
Immerse yourself in character and enter the ‘Missing Link Experience’.
The Yeti, Big Foot, Sasquatch, Meh-teh, Yeren, Abominable Snowman – there are many names for this archetypal creature: neither human, nor animal, but bridging the divide. As a recurring motif in a steady flow of unverified news stories of sightings, the legend of a lonely, hunted species has become a global pop icon, without ever actually revealing itself.
Meanwhile the Missing Link seems to have lost all biological connotations as the myth reverberates in endless circuits of communication and information.
The installation presents the crypto-zoological species as a tableau vivant, frozen in time as it performs a strange mystical rite of reunification with its conspecifics.
A surrounding 360 degree video + 6 channel audio loop loosely narrates the rise and fall of the creature, reaching from found footage of yeti sightings in international news to psychedelic landscapes depicting their ongoing struggle to re-unite as a functional tribe.
The work is a collaboration between Pictoplasma and Berlin-based costume designers Werkstattkollektiv, performance artists and dancers Jared Gradinger & Friends, and Japanese artist and motion designer Motomichi Nakamura.
In 2011 we were invited by prestigious La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris to curate a vast exhibition on the topic of contemporary character culture.
“Post Digital Monster” presented a selection of international artists who have transformed their characters from digital to analogue, re-discovering such slow media as bronze, wool, clay, wood, rubber and different methods of drawing and painting.
This ‘post-digital’ strategy can be seen as a quest for a state of permanence beyond the fleeting, flickering moment when the digital ‘monsters’ appear on our computer screens.
The approach also links figurative art to an ancient genealogy distinct from our all-surface digital culture: the ritualistic practices, mystic totems and animist masks that combine anthropomorphic principles with graphical abstraction.
“Post Digital Monster” featured original art-work and installations by Shoboshobo, FriendsWithYou, Ben & Julia, Jordan Metcalf, Steve Alexander, Joshua Ben Longo, Nick Sheehy, Motomichi Nakamura, Nina Braun, AJ Fosik, Overture, Sarah Illenberger, Raymond Lemstra, Roman Klonek, Allison Schulnik, Nick Cave, Megan Whitmarsh and many more
The Character Walk is an open tour through numerous galleries, project spaces and other locations made temporarily available to host exhibitions, installations and performances of outstanding international character art. In a careful selection, Pictoplasma invites innovative artists and designers working with a reduced visual vocabulary of anthropomorphic shapes to present their work as part of the event. We fulfil all steps in the conception and planning of the exhibitions in close collaboration with the artists and spaces.
The Character Walk is promoted extensively in a focused media campaign and through the production of a special map locating all exhibitions and explaining the concept of the individual shows.
The Character Walk has meanwhile spread from Berlin to New York and Parts, always accompanying the Pictoplasma Festival. All exhibitions are open to the general public, entrance free of charge.
In 2011 Pictoplasma conceived “The Missing Link Show”, combining live music concerts, video projections and dance performances to create an over-the-top pop opera following the visual narration of an archetypical mysterious creature - The Missing Link. The Show lays out the myth of an unknown tribe of a lonely species in the wilderness, and tells the story of their happy existence, their rise and fall, their exile and re-unification. The creatures have been designed by Pictoplasma as clan of costumes in reference to the Yeti or Big Foot, Abominable Snowman and Chupacabra legends - some of the last mysterious entities without a clear depiction in our culture of visual overdose and instant google-search gratification.
While the live music acts function on their own as a pop concert, the parallel visuals and performances add a narrative layer, following the story of the lonely species. The show plays out the fantasy of how these characters fell from their happy homogenous existence as a functional hippiesque tribe to turn into a hunted species of lonely, desperate creatures and outsiders, and culminates in an alternative synthesis of their return to fulfill an immersive ritual that involves us humans.
The show premiered 2011 on the revolving stage of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, featuring Maximilian Hecker and Dan Deacon, and was re-staged in an adapted version at la Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, in collaboration with Jason Forrest.
Early 2011 Fashion Net e.V., Düsseldorf, approached us to help them bring some contemporary character chaos into the huge Fashion Net Night Party they were planning. To make this a visual overdose worth remembering we immediately snapped into action and flew over Japanese artist and VJ Motomichi Nakamura, who added the optical stimuli to the spinning tunes of DJ Mark Ronson. Our Character Ride installation not only served as the smiling back-drop to cat walk presentation by fashion designer Philippa Lindenthal, the same mechanism later on also had the honor of violently shaking off several of her surprisingly skinny models.
Additionally, professional dancers from the prestigious groups Sasha Waltz, Constanza Macras and Pina Bausch agreed to force themselves into the costumes of our PictoOrphanage and added the necessary bling to the night.
As un-official hosts of the evening they managed to turn the fashion event’s red carpet into their very own stage, randomly attacking the surprised paparazzi, mis-using every opportunity to roughly rub shoulders with the local celebrity, happily disturbing the cat-walk presentations, and ecstatically pole-dancing the night away before a rather bewildered Düsseldorf crowd.
During 2011 Pictoplasma teamed up with Nokia, who generously supported the festival’s accompanying Character Walk exhibitions in Berlin, New York and Paris.
Apart from hosting a central exhibition of selected character-artwork created as wallpaper for the newly launched N8 device, Nokia provided its map services to help visitors navigate throughout the many diverse gallery exhibitions and project space installations within the city centre. A growing live-feed of images shot with the companies N8 devices additionally allowed an interested online community to witness the character walk’s activity in real-time.
Area Code, the most innovative agency for urban games based in New York, commissioned Pictoplasma to produce a family of more than 150 individual character designs, allowing visitors of the American pavilion at the Expo Shanghai 2010 to engage in a unique interactive adventure. The challenge was to enhance the exposure of Johnson & Johnson with an installation that not only engages the viewer into a playful experience, but also communicates notions of caring and connecting. Visitors were encouraged to give birth to their very own, individual character on a huge presentation screen by texting personal messages via their mobile phones.
The incoming messages acted as the DNA to create unique critters that would accompany the visitors during their long stroll through the exhibition, and could be given further instructions to playfully interact with other characters on their way. Each interaction was accompanied by a little, rewarding animation and generated points that were ultimately transferred to real currency and donated by Johnson & Johnson for Chinese charity purposes.
The individual characters live on and can be revisited while they continuously populate an ever-growing interactive website, where they can be re-transferred to the mobile phones of their creators.
After having seen Fons Schiedon’s wonderful paintings and experimental animation for his solo-exhibition “Before in place; Earlier in time” at the Character Walk 2009, he was commissioned to create the official opener and CI for the 2010 Pictoplasma Festival. The pitch was to reference the nouveau vague of 3D cinematography, while playing with the essential problem of flat, abstract character design being a strictly graphical, disembodied species. The resulting video can be viewed in classic 3D with red-cyan anaglyph glasses.
In 2010, accompanying the release of the book “Pen To Paper”, Pictoplasma presented a series of exhibitions in Germany, France and the UK, featuring original work by the key players of what was being labelled “DIY art” “fractured figuration” or “new psychedelic folk”. The revival of analogue skills had injected immeasurable visual wealth into the world of illustration, fine art and especially character design. Artists started to reject the computer and channel their creativity through spontaneous freehand drawing to create untamed, edgy and exceptional beings.
All that seemed left of our beloved cartoon faces, familiar consumer mascots and pop icon characters is a distorted, far away echo.
After its initial premiere at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in France, the Pen to Paper collection exhibited at Concrete Hermit (London), artSPACE (Berlin) and Galerie LJ (Paris), featuring the original works by Shoboshobo (FR), Allyson Mellberg Taylor (US), Seth Scriver (CA), Andrew James Jones (UK), John Casey (US), Luke Ramsey (CA), Eric Shaw (US), Thomas Bernard (FR), Lane Hagood (US), Joey Haley (CA), Swoon (USA), Kerozen (FR), Ian Stevenson (UK), Arnaud Loumeau (FR), Fia Cielen (BE), Frédéric Fleury (FR), Matt Lock (US), Ola Vasiljeva (NL), and Yu Matsuoka (JP/FR).
In the months and weeks prior to the exhibition “Prepare for Pictopia” (2009), a selected group of international artists were commissioned by Pictoplasma and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt to create new site-specific artwork. These works played on the main topics of the exhibition: the remix of a common visual vocabulary, the animistic physical presence of character design and the approach to interact with characters in ritualistic play. One of the most ambitious tasks was to transform the venue’s vast, empty lobby, so Pictoplasma invited Miami based artist duo FriendsWithYou to join in and create an unforgettable experience.
The areal with over 800 square meters was re-designed as a full-grown interactive installation referencing a suburban landscape, including private hide-aways, cheerful picket fences and FriendsWithYou’s legendary bouncing castle “Fun House”.
Not only was the installation the first to greet visitors of the exhibition, thus having to introduce and transport the exhibition’s core topics. Most importantly it had to be carefully conceived and produced in such a way to stand up to the enormous – and sometimes uncontrollable – willingness, of the more than 30.000 visitors to engage in wild, limitless and untamed play.
As the central installation for the exhibition “Prepare for Pictopia” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2009), Pictoplasma produced a series of five unique, interactive bumper cars referencing iconic characters by international artists Motomichi Nakamura (US/JP), Boris Hoppek (DE), Nathan Jurevicius (AUS), Tado (UK) and Doma (ARG).
Every hour lights gradually faded as the sun set in the exhibition hall, while the central marked place arena came to life in an illuminated fire-work of sounds, lights and colours. The dodgems awoke and invited visitors to hop in the character cars for a truly psychedelic ritual.
Accompanied by the special, 6 channel soundtrack composed by Künstler Treu, a synchronised light-show in blue, red and white revealed the previously hidden multilayered inhabitants of the graphical arena designed by Steve Alexander from the art-collective Rinzen.
The Bumper cars have since made a reappearance at the Internationaal Beeldfestival in Rotterdam, where visitors were able to literally bump away each others visual fatigue.
In 2009 the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) invited Pictoplasma to curate the world’s first large-scale exhibition on contemporary character design and art. “Prepare for Pictopia” playfully explored the phenomenon and offered new and surprising insight into a growing scene of graphic designers and artists that work with a shared set of icons, opening up new contexts and correlations. The exhibition examined the contemporary vague of reduced figuration as a strategy for producing a vitalism outside established narratives. These so-called characters are reduced to the anthropomorphic function of eye contact which seems to look out from flat pictorial space at the viewer.
Besides a large number of site specific work created especially for the occasion by Akinori Oishi, Doma Collective, Doudouboy, Doma, Juan Pablo Cambariere, Rinzen, Borris Hoppek, Waynehorse, FriendsWithYou and Shoboshobo, the group show presented original artwork by: Mark Ryden, AJ Fosik, Ben Frost, Daniel & Geo Fuchs, Dylan Martorell, Edwina Ashton, Faiyaz Jafri, Fons Schiedon, Gary Baseman, Golan Levin, Hideaki Kawashima, Ian Stevenson, James Marshall, Jeremy Dower, Motomichi Nakamura, Nagi Noda, Olaf Breuning, Sam Gibbons, Tim Biskup and many more…
French designer Florent Feys aka Doudouboy has worked extensively for the luxury industry – his luscious, oneiric and crystalline illustration style is the perfect match to brand high-class products such as haute couture or radiant perfumes.
In 2009, Pictoplasma commissioned Doudouboy to collaborate on a large-scale, walkable installation, playing on the topic of perfect and sterile consumer aesthetics incorporating minimal, yet engaging characters. The aim was to create a maximal notion of desire while keeping the viewer at unreachable distance.
The installation “Brilhante” employs the optical illusion of an infinity room by arranging mirrors to seal and extend a closed space. This endless void is the perfect stage for an over-sized, gently revolving koala bear statue covered in exclusive fur.
A soundtrack sets an uncanny mood, as the visitor is tempted to touch, hug and cuddle the precious creature, only to see his own image endlessly reflected in the life-less eyes and infinite space of the installation.
In 2009 Pictoplasma commissioned upcoming talent and animation wunderkind David OReilly to create the Pictoplasma Festival’s official opener and CI. David OReilly’s animation is known for a dark sense of humour and psychological suspense. David has produced a wide variety of shorts (winning the ‘Golden Bear’ for best short film at the Berlinale 2009) in parallel to projects for feature movies or bands such as M.I.A. or U2.
Production: Pictoplasma
Direction: David OReilly
Music: Bob Gruen
To welcome visitors of the “Prepare for Pictopia” festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, celebrating the best in contemporary character design and art from the 19th of March to the 3rd of May 2009, Pictoplasma and Wiyumi designed a series of character clan flags representing selected original art-work included in the central exhibition.
The flags referenced reduced and abstract versions of characters by Motomichi Nakamura, Boris Hoppek, Tim Biskup, Tado, FriendsWithYou, Akinori Oishi and Doma.
Additionally a series of wearable lucha-libre masks depicting the same reduced characters were on offer, allowing visitors to “Get into Character” themselves.
We had the honor of collaborating with Montreal’s Sid Lee Collective to host the Opening Night for our very first Pictoplasma NYC Festival in 2008.
Sid Lee’s headquarters have a long tradition of gathering creative talent and inviting them to customize the black boards spread throughout their office. Together we set up a huge black board landscape at the Red Bull Space in the centre of Manhattan, inviting the speakers of the conference and the attendees to give out a go…
Participating artists included FriendsWithYou, Fons Schiedon, Akinori Oishi, Motomichi Nakamura, David OReilly, Tokyoplastic, Aaron Stewart and Gangpol & Mit.
In 2008 the TodaysArt Festival, Den Haag, invited Pictoplasma to come up with an open, collective urban game. We accepted the kind invitation and set up a real-life, Mario-Kart-like race, straight through the passage in front of the Ministry of Environment (tellingly named VROM).
Two huge trucks brought in hay to mark the track and the “Character Collision Army” recruitment office was erected, where festival visitors were drafted, drilled and prepared for a truly character-driven combat.
The result was a gasoline infused thrill with roaring go-karts, a high speed radio edit by Jason Forrest blasting from the ministry’s propaganda speakers, drill-instructor Jared Gradinger shouting out rude commands and the opportunity for clue-less passer-byes to support their favorite character clan, designed by Motomichi Nakamura, Fons Schiedon and Rinzen.
In retrospect we are all puzzled that no one was seriously hurt…
