PICTOPLASMA: THE CHARACTER ENCYCLOPEDIA

It’s a new era of global character appeal. While playfully evading the limitations of commercial interests, cultural contexts and narrative intentions, contemporary character design has become the key player of visual communication worldwide. Since the beginning the Pictoplasma project has closely accompanied the character movement with publications, exhibitions, festivals and conferences. With the long awaited follow-up publication, The Character Encyclopaedia, Pictoplasma delivers an in-depth exploration of the latest tendencies in current character design and art, spanning from drawing, design and painting to its use in installations and sculpture. Pictoplasma not only creates the world’s first Encyclopaedia of figurative design - by cataloguing the characters as independent life-forms of their own right, the compilation enables to examine similarities and permutations of globally recurring motifs and styles. By sorting, clustering, cross-referencing and inter-linking the creations of a disparate scene of artists, the encyclopaedia creates a unique cartography of the latest generations populating the character universe.