Pictoplasma showcases contemporary character design through their publications, exhibitions, festivals and conferences. Wheel spoke to organiser Peter Tahler about their 3rd annual Pictopia conference being held in Berlin in March.

Interview by Victoria Ford

How did Pictoplasma get started and who attends the conferences? Pictoplasma was founded at the end of 1999 as a reaction to an overwhelming flood of iconographic figures on websites, billboards and food packaging. Our main goal has been to free character representation from commercial intentions and the popular psychology of storytelling, and to explore instead a new breed of character design which crosses all cultural boundaries.

Our conferences and festivals are visited by a diverse crowd of artists, illustrators, designers, agencies and fans.

Here's a quote from your website: “traditional animation systems of inter-changeable characteristics, predictable story telling and limited movements are being overturned by a new generation of character designers who are redefining the craft.” What can people who attend the festival expect to see that's different to what they know about mainstream character design? The very term ‘character design’ has its roots in classical animation. Here, its primary function is to define a fixed set of shapes necessary for the endless reproduction of a drawn character, ensuring that its characteristics remain unchanged by time or movement.

The geometric breakdown and simplification of a figure into basic forms allows any number of draftsmen and studios to animate it simultaneously, enabling parts of the same production to be outsourced throughout the world. In this way, industrial production conditions have created a universal, visual vocabulary which has standardised and shaped the world of animation for the past seven decades.

The graphical character design of recent years, however, has nothing to do with standardised global production conditions but stems from individuals wanting to communicate with increasing numbers of people. The characters they create are free of all narrative and cultural restrictions; they are shiny new reflective surfaces onto which viewers and storytellers can project the psychology, attitude or emotion of their choosing.

Additionally, new technologies have been pushing standardised character design ever closer towards redundancy, as graphic designers and illustrators use their skills and inexpensive equipment to breathe life into their creations. With no respect for physical standards, genre boundaries and narrative pop psychology, their approach is less 19th century novel and more a systematic view of life-forms in their own universe.

What new things can people expect to see at this year's conference? At our upcoming festival, for the first time, this new character design phenomenon will be the subject of scientific scrutiny. For example, how are characters deployed as agents of desire, and what is the role of ritual and masks in the worlds of these characters? Neurobiologists, ethnologists, art historians, theatre studies academics, media theorists and roboticists will approach character culture from diverse angles and offer new perspectives on the phenomenon in lectures and podium discussions.

More information on Pictoplasma

www.pictoplasma.com/

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