PICTOPIA PICTOPIA!

Interview by : Vitalija Stepušaitytė.

With : Lars Denicke.

MOYTOY presents you an interview with Lars Denicke one of creators and organizers of this exciting „Pictopia“ event.

If you are into characters more or less, you will definetelly read this interview and I'm sure you love it as we did.

There are some tips and backstage of PICTOPIA festival, useful information and the criterias for being invited to participate with pictoplasma.

Organizers: Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler

The third PICTOPIA is over already. How do the organisers feel about it?

After one and half years of preparation for this festival, of course we feel pretty exhausted. The main challenge for us was to create the central exhibition. From the beginning, we knew that we will have a split audience – those people who know the visual cultures of characters and those who have no idea. This meant a great challenge to us, as we wanted to address both with a fresh perspective. Those who are familiar with the topic and are fans of some of the artists and produce great work themselves should be surprised by the way we arrange it and by the new installations. Newcomers should understand characters are not just cute eyecatchers, that they are not limited to classical formats as comic, animation etc., but work throughout different media. And we wanted all of them to get an unsettling feeling, to be haunted by the strong looks of the characters and their overall cry for life and corporeality.

It is not upon us to judge if we have succeeded, but have attracted a large number of visitors, who have given us really interesting reactions. Concerning the insight-crowd – time will tell!

It was a very satisfying experience to produce new works and installations in close collaboration with some of our favourite artists. As we have focussed so much on the central exhibition, we were even more happy that the other segments of the festival worked out so well – especially the Character Walk with amazing exhibitions, the Symposium (where we feel that the audience used to designers’ and artists’ lectures gained a lot from the academic perspectives), the Breakfast Pitch (where all of the presentations were entertaining and interesting and managed perfectly to show twelve images in the limited time of six minutes), and finally the Performance Weekend that brought everything together from completely different angles.

AJ Fosik's presentation

How do you see the future of this festival/ simposium ?

We will definitely continue to focus on the conference. There is a certain dilemma linked to the experience of this edition: it felt more professional and grown up, not only the academic speakers, all artists and designers tried to explain their motivation and general concept for their work. This was great, but possibly came along with a lack of unconfined enthusiasm on the side of the audience, who also feel to have grown up.

Given the vast size of the venue, it was a bit tricky to create the same communual atmosphere as at previous editions, so this is definitely a task for the future. The Symposium could be even more integrated into the programme, maybe with less speakers per session. And the Breakfast Pitch was so entertaining and fresh that it will definitely become a central element.

There were several times mentioned the opinion that PICTOPIA becomes such a big event, popular and more official than before, that it starts to become institutional. How you will try to avoid this?

We don’t share this view. The venue was bigger than in 2006, but the auditorium was exactly the same size, 1000 seats. In 2006, more agency people were there, so if one wants to take this as criteria for the event being official, it fails for this edition. The price for the conference ticket is distinctively below other design conferences, so we make it possible for basically all people who are really interested to attend. But we will keep in mind that the people want to have unrestricted outlets for their creative energy.

Concerning the exhibition: if you want to present original art that is shipped in from different corners of the world over the duration of six weeks, you have to move away from a gallery to an institution. This comes at the price of feeling more official and institutional. As much as we liked to see the original works ourselves (I remember being blown away by the colours of Tim Biskup’s ‘No God But God’), maybe it is more interesting to focus on new installations and to create overall experiences for the people to share.

In any case, ‘Prepare for Pictopia’ was the story of the fantasy of us humans to enter the world of the characters who are bound to their media of images. We chose the format of an art exhibition to tell this story, spreading out a variety of works, and undermined this format by enabling people to get in touch with the characters themselves, as in Doudouboy’s installation of the Koala in the infinite mirror room or of course the bumper cars. Whatever will be the next story, it will have a new format.

Faiyaz Jafri’s talk

Boris Hoppek & friends

How do you choose the participants? What are the criterias?

We look out for a mix of media, like animation, illustration, fine art, design, and we look out for artists and designers who have a consistent aspect central to their work, one character or family of characters they stick to rather than switching from one project to the other. Of course, there are exceptions.

What is the character for you personaly?

A character is a non-living entity, able to shift from one (visual) medium to the other, working with the principles of reduction and formalism. It is not based on representation in its relation to reality, but on abstraction and internal formalization. Most important, although not being alive in a biological sense, it gives the viewer the feeling of being present and active, a quality that is grasped by the term ‘animism’. Characters aim at our emotional response and involvement – and are most successful if they get us!

What do you find fascinating about characters? Technique, simplicity, narrative, difficulty, joy etc.?

To be emotionally involved and surprised.

Image from symposium

What is the future of creating them? It seems that everything is possible (from Ian Stevenson to Klaus Haapaniemi), so what do you think - how designers/ artists will surprise us later?

We are part of those that are being surprised, so I really don’t know.

There are so many new artists who try to present their creatures. You have to observe them, to find new trends, tendencies. What would be your suggestions for beginners?

Keep it simple. Explore different media, but remember to work with a pen.

There is an opinion that advertisements are not so arty as indipendant art works. Do you really see/ feel the differences?

Of course, commercial work comes with a lot of compromises or at least restrictions. This can be good in some cases, so on the one hand we don’t see the difference. But: in order to invest a character with a healthy overdose of animism, it needs to be independent from a commercial purpose, the reduction of a certain function and association with a product. This can only be achieved in the long run with non-commercial works.

And the last question which is maybe not so serious. Have you realized that 100 percent of artists who talked, presented their artworks, revisiting friends were only male. There were just some female artists who did animation. What do you think about it? Any ideas why?

Well, it feels pretty serious to us. At least there were Risa Sato and Andrea Crews who are great female artists. Maybe male artists feel the strong need to give birth to something, and that is why they follow the strategy of consistency and focus one (type of) character. Female artists would then be more flexible and invest more into the variety of their creations. Again, this rule is full of exceptions we all know and follows an outlived cliché of gender stereotypes. This definitely is our blind spot and we will do our homework!

Thank You

MOYTOY/vitalija

Thank You,
Lars Denicke

Risa Sato and her balloon like sculptures

Marek Michalowski and his Keepon

James Jarvis presentation and live drawing

Instalation with Boris Hoppek and Nathan Jurevicius toys.

Gaston Caba presentation and amazing song!

Videos:

Preparation

Pictopia Aerobicks

Der Rinzen-Autoscooter

Me:)

See you soon!

More about pictoplasma here

More about exhibition here

More about animation festival here