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.
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.
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…
MORE ON PICTOPIA > HERE
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.
No other living creature features as heavily in contemporary character design and art as the humble hare. Bunnies are definitely the most depicted creatures of all times, a fact that was also reflected by the endless stream of rabbits daily submitted to Pictoplasma’s archives by international artists. But what exactly makes bunnies so irresistible?
There’s no such thing as too much bunnies! And just to prove it, in 2006 Pictoplasma intentionally asked internationally established and upcoming character designers, illustrators and artists around the globe to send in their versions of rabbits, bunnies, hares and everything in between.
The result is a full-scale bunny overdose, with far more than 1.500 individual rabbits from 500+ international contributers. By condensing the endless variations of the rabbit motif into one ultimate system – a perfect bunny mandala – the true nature of the beast emerges: the eternal essence of rabbit.
“The Bunny Mandala Shrine” was installed at the sous-station of Projet Diligence in Nice (France), during the onedotzero Festival in London (UK), at Bios Athens (Greece) and the South Eastern Centre for Contemporary Arts (SECCA) in North Carolina (USA).
In a unique cooperation of the creative avantgarde from character and costume design, in 2006 Pictoplasma transformed the most captivating, screwball and outstanding characters of our time into fantastic costumes. Padded, hydraulic or helium-filled, the creatures have literally come to life at last. Based on the designs of illustrators from Buenos Aires, Miami, Barcelona, Toronto, Osaka or Paris, the new inhabitants of the virtual PictoOrphanage allowed real-life donors to sponsor them – and thereby enable the production and birth of corporeal characters from the realm of the digital image.
Dancers and performers under the direction of choreograph Jared Gradinger (Constanza Macras / Dorky Park, Berlin) explored these new life forms and their individual character. Freed from the binds of storytelling and advertising, the characters developed their individual will, which they have proudly demonstrated in countless guerrilla style interventions during their ongoing tour. Meanwhile, the orphans have made memorable appearances in all corners of the globe, from France, Germany, New York, The Netherlands, Sweden, all the way to China, turning the urban streets into a main stage for their adventures.
MORE ON THE PICTOORPHANAGE > HERE
