Characters at War
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I see. In your books you talk about a “graphical language.”
Right. The project is also an exploration of character design as a universal visual language -- as both a platform and a forum.
So smallness and simplicity are important. Is this where the
“cute” factor comes into play?)
Yes, as you can see, cuteness is quite prevalent. It’s interesting to look at how different artists are playing with cuteness. Many character designs mix cute with evil. Or violence. Some characters eat each other and some engage in acts of self-mutilation. James Marshall’s work, for instance, shows a character that becomes increasingly more tortured over time, to the point it’s almost an unrecognizable abstraction. There’s also a dynamic between “cute” and “sexy.” The interplay of cuteness and youth with sex appeal, or hyper-sexualized child’s play, is another major theme in character design at the moment.
The cuteness of the characters was a big selling point for me. But how did all of this start? What did you do before you started compiling character art, Peter?
PT: I studied film and then went into animation. I was very excited when I landed my first animation job, but I quickly grew to hate it. I was a good animator. However, I wasn’t the best draftsman because it took me a while to get things just right: make sure the eyes are even and everything’s proportionate, etc. It was frustrating for me. And I was very bored with traditional animation, which is what all the employers wanted. I quit that first job and started directing and working in commercials.
I read that you directed Madonna’s “American Pie” video.
)
PT:
I co-directed it together with Philip Stölzl, but I was not too happy
with it.
Why?
PT: Because the result’s not daring enough.
What was it like working with Madonna?
PT: She’s very professional but also quite demanding, a bit of a control freak. I also worked with Rammstein, Garbage, and a-ha.
That’s an impressive line-up. What about your background, Lars?
LD: I’m interested in conceptual and theoretical studies and I’m currently working towards my doctorate. I’m looking at the way media influences content, which is pretty applicable to our project.
How so? What’s the subject of your research?
LD: In short, I’m looking at airports as the media and air traffic as the content. Air travel can’t exist without its medium: the network of airports. If we extend this thinking to Pictoplasma, what happens to characters if they lose their media? What if there is no Internet? Do they exist?
Do they?)
LD: Well, characters seem to be looking at us; they make reference to a life outside of the picture, as if there was a realm of their own where they are alive. This is an old question: the origin of images in culture, if you want to address it in such a universal way, can be traced to the corpse. The corpse is still the same body of the person when being alive, but it’s altered so radically as it is dead. As a tactile abstraction, dolls and fetishes transported the dead body into the realm of the image. Artists working with character design are playing with this incorporation and lifelessness, reversing the direction as there is no living character and no corpse before its visualisation.
On the other hand, media theory addresses other aspects. It’s about
how technological structures and formal systems, the grid and network,
produce what we call content or even the essence. This is a radical anti-idealist
position. Most prominent, Marshall McLuhan made word of this thought in
the 1960s in his saying: "The medium is the message." So if
applied to character design, images living in an invisible realm of their
own would not find their expression through the above-mentioned abstraction,
but rather through the configuration of computer technology. Pixel style
would be a very obvious configuration.