2012, PRODUCTION

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

2011, PRODUCTION

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

.

MORE ON THE RESIDENCY > HERE

2011, INSTALLATION

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.

2011, EXHIBITION

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

MORE ON POST DIGITAL MONSTERS > HERE

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.

2011, PRODUCTION

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.