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Characters at War
Guu joins Peter Thaler and Lars Denicke of Pictoplasma for their latest opening, a few drinks, and a discussion about contemporary character design.---------------
By Blair Cooper
June 15, 2006 | They splash, curse, and collide. They critique consumerism with a catchy pop song and dance and lament about their sex lives. They’re today’s liveliest characters and every corner of the art world is their playground.
The referees, lovingly attentive but lax with the whistle, are Peter Thaler and Lars Denicke of Berlin, Germany. Their Pictoplasma Project culls top-notch character art from around the globe, with the fields of corporate logo design, fine and urban art, advertising, animation, and comics all present under the project’s multimedia umbrella. And Thaler and Denicke are ruthless. They tackle the job from every angle: archives, websites, art books, DVDs, exhibitions, and a biennial all-things-character conference. The result is an insightful foray into the frontier of contemporary character design, elevating it into a genre of its own.
I traveled to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, USA, for the opening of Characters at War, a life-size Pictoplasma installation of character art from around the globe. I then caught up with Thaler and Denicke between events for a jaunt downtown and some one-on-two atop a grassy hill the following day.
Welcome to North Carolina. Have you been here before?
Thanks a lot, it’s our first time visiting and we’re honored to be here. The SECCA is a great space, but its size is intimidating. We didn’t quite fill it up with our characters -- maybe next time [laughs] -- but hopefully we did it justice.
It looks great and I’m glad your tour made a stop so close to home. Before we begin in earnest, how would you sum up the Pictoplasma Project -- in one sentence?
Pictoplasma frees contemporary character design and art from the limitations of commercial interests, cultural contexts, and narrative intentions.
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correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t call yourselves artists?
No, we’re not artists. We’re collectors, really. But there’s a strong element of selectivity to what we do. The artwork in our exhibitions, publications, and archives is representative of some of the very best in international character design.
How selective are you?
Well, in Pictoplasma 2 -- our second book -- we had over 8,500 character submissions to choose from when deciding what to include in the book. We ended up using about a third. There were some works we really liked but just didn’t have space for. Size, page layout, and placement concerns also affected the selection process to an extent.
That must have been tough. So how do you decide? What constitutes contemporary character design?
We’re primarily interested in character design after the year 2000. It’s around the turn of the millennium that we saw the emergence of character design on a new level via the Internet. Much of character design is rooted in game design and pixel characters (although now we have everything from vector-based characters to plush toys). Working with pixels and the Net often requires simplicity of form. Characters need to be small and communicable. So contemporary characters are just visuals, not unlike empty screens. They function as letters, typography, and ideograms.
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