Pictoplasma is currently underway in Paris. Hosted by La Gaité Lyrique, the Berlin-born contemporary character design and art festival hosts a slew of the brightest artists currently producing work : AJ Fosik, Allison Schulnik, Ben&Julia, FRIENDSWITHYOU, Hyein Lee, Jeremy Dower, Jordan Metcalf, Joshua Ben Longo, Juan Pablo Cambariere, Megan Whitmarsh, Motomichi Nakamura, Mymo, Nick Cave, Nick Sheehy, Nin Braun, Overture, Raymond Lemstra, Rina Donnersmarck, Roman Klonek, Sarah Illenberger, Shoboshobo, and Steve Alexander.

If I've included the whole roster of participants above, it's because to often those who work in character design exist on the periphery of the art world. Only the most interested and involved public will seek them out. So often illustrators and animators, and other character designers see their work appreciated but cast of as cartoons, puppetry, or graffiti. But there's a little more (read a lot) to it than that, and thanks to Pictoplasma and the hard work of it's creators Peter Thaler and Lars Denicke, more people are becoming familiar with the idea.

For the past ten years Pictoplasma's main business has been to develop and promote this type of work through conferencing, ateliers, expos, and festivals, while working against the "disney-ification" (read simplification) of character development. Their philosophy : to see the character not for what it physically represents but as the vehicle for the visual language, a sequence, something universal, that has been constricted to a few pixels.

The name of the company (and festival) is therefore quite befitting : "Picto" being derived from pictogram, signifying an anti-narrative character that tells no particular story, and "plasma" with a dual signification: the live image, a creature. Going to the festival means letting yourself discover what active character development is, as opposed to the passive work more often delivered to us on TV and at the movies.

The expo at la Gaité Lyrique chose the above mentioned artists for the trasncendance of their work. The characters they create aren't limited to one platform but evolve from digital to analogue, turning to more traditional drawing and painting techniques, and the use of materials like yarn, bronze, wool, wood, rubber... A strategy set in motion in an attempt to draw out the lifespan of their digital counterparts. It also highlights the abstraction (graphically speaking) that is the starting point for any interaction between us humans and the characters and imagery.

Some of my coups de coeurs for the festival:

The Psychedelic Yeti by Jason Forrest & Jean Nipon

Never have I ever enjoyed a peice as much as this. You walk into a enclosed room in the middle of the expo. Inside are projections beautifully occupying the space on the walls, moving from one end of the room to the other, forcing you to move with them. In the middle of the room stood four sculptures - white, fuzzy, Yetis - three around one massive one, the lights dimming and changing hews as the videos being projected onto the walls illustrate the hazy history of Yeti sightings around the world during what seems to be the 90's. It went on for at least 20 minutes and because it was a thursday night, no one was there but myself. It's the closest I've ever come to experience the holodeck (yes, I just made a Star Treck ref...)

Characters in Motion - Vol.3
a 3 hour compilation of the 40 best works this year, including Asterokid, Marc Craste, Fluorescent Hill, McBess, Satoru Ohno, David OReilly, Fons Schiedon, Joel Trussell, Nagi Noda, W+K Tokyo Lab, Lucas Zanotto, among others.