Try a little mind game: Let your eyes roam lazily over your bedroom. What, or whom, do you see there? A floor lamp nods its sleepy round head, blushing faintly in one corner. A chuck all-star sneaker flaps out from under the bed, tongue lolling out. On the wall, a clock’s pointy nose twirls away the hours, while the bed overflows with stuffed animals, all jumbled and enchanted in a puppy-pile of sleep. Down by the dust ruffle, barely visible, a wall socket blinks its enigmatic eye.

THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC IMPERATIVE
What quirk in the human imagination makes us see life where there is none? How can an object’s curves or assembly of buttons and zippers irresistibly suggest a face or a body? Taken a step further, is this imaginative impulse so different from the creative leaps it takes to sharpen a graphic design—adding a curlicue to imbue a design with a feminine feel, or shading a logo with black to bolster its muscle? What “muscle”? What “femininity”? It may be maddeningly hard to pin down the answers, but one thing is clear: The business of design relies heavily on a surprisingly common human belief—that the images we create are striving towards some independent form of life.

This anima-seeking impulse has found remarkably strong expression over the last 10 years in character art. The discipline started underground in late-1990s Hong Kong and Japan, with streetwise, anime- and videogame-inspired characters by Gary Baseman, Takashi Murakami and Boris Hoppek. The internet’s growth fueled character art further, as nascent online communities of “kidults” began feverishly stockpiling limited-edition “urban vinyl” figurines, posters and other paraphernalia bearing an ever-more-diverse array of characters.

PICTOORPHANAGE CHARACTERS POSE FOR A CLOSE-UP. “JEAN,” “REBECCA” AND “FRED” BY GENEVIEVE GAUCKLER; “HELPER” BY TIM BISKUP; AND “MALFI” AND “BOY” BY FRIENDS WITH YOU. PHOTO BY PICTOPLASMA.

Character design hit the mainstream only recently, thanks to advances in small-scale manufacturing that made limited runs of plush toys, collectible books, apparel and housewares economically viable. Specialty retail outlets for character design, like Kid Robot and Rotofugi, hit a sweet spot among design consumers looking for brands large enough to exude a shared cachet but small enough to still feel exclusive. As character art infiltrates both high- and lowbrow venues, from Art Basel Miami Beach to the American International Toy Fair in New York, it’s worth asking: With such monstro success already under its belt, where can character design conceivably go next? And what ineffable mix of traits spells a character’s success or failure?

Enter Pictoplasma. Begun in 1999 in Berlin, this first selfdescribed archive for contemporary character art and design attempts to document the growing discipline’s history in exhibitions, conferences and an encyclopedia, while sketching possibilities for its exciting future. I spoke with Pictoplasma cofounders Peter Thaler and Lars Denicke about what it takes to infuse characters with real, breathing life.

BY GUM, IT’S ALIVE!
A pen-and-paper animator himself, Thaler was alternately thrilled and appalled by character design’s explosion in the late 1990s. “Pictoplasma started as a reaction to an overwhelming flood of extremely weak iconographic figures featured on websites, billboards and in animation,” Thaler explains. “We wanted to set a well-thought-out, stylistically sure-footed, high-quality collection of figures against the daily overdose of random mascots and annoying sympathy seekers.”

“It was around the turn of the millennium that we saw the emergence of character design on a new level via the internet,” he continues. “At that time much of the character visuals were rooted in game design and pixel graphics, [and] working with pixels and the internet required a radical simplicity of form. Characters needed to be simple and globally communicable. So the birth of contemporary characters links them to letters, typography and ideograms.” It’s an intriguing idea that now rumbles like a steady drumbeat under all of Pictoplasma’s activities: Characters, Thaler and Denicke believe, are the basis for no less than a new, global form of visual communication. Even the name Pictoplasma underlines this theory. As Thaler puts it, “The project is all about reduced life-forms with lively traits. So Picto stands for pictogram, the simple, abstract visual, and plasma refers to the human body, the blood, the dirt, the emotion. Well, something like that.”

Thaler and Denicke, who holds a doctorate in cultural studies, set out to define how and why a successful character feels suffused with life, while another lies inert on the page or screen. For starters, they noticed a fundamental rift between older animated characters like Bugs Bunny or Krazy Kat—whose sense of life was always tied to specific narratives and psychological profiles—and contemporary character designs, which are usually born in a pixilated void, divorced from defined storylines and, as such, alluringly incomplete. Their life-potential springs purely from their own forms and the myriad storylines, scenarios and relationships that those forms can suggest to viewers.

What Thaler concluded was radically simple: “The key to character design is investing the design with an appearance of life, animating it in the sense of lending it an ‘anima’ or soul. It’s what we project onto the image that triggers this animation, but the density and strength of their designs make characters an ideal screen for our imaginations.”

The project began in late 1999 as a straight archive, cataloging top-shelf character designs as they emerged around the globe. From the archive sprang a series of Pictoplasma traveling exhibitions, including the Bunny Mandala Shrine, a bewildering array of bunny characters radiating in a circle; Characters at War, a series of waist-high cutouts of various characters, forming a ragtag army that confronts the viewer and each other; and various Colour Me! exhibits, huge, line-drawn wall murals that invite museum-goers to color them in. The success of these events led Pictoplasma to publish its first Character Encyclopaedia with Berlin design publisher Die Gestalten Verlag in 2001; a new volume under Pictoplasma’s own imprint hit bookstores last November.

WRITE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
The lean, abstracted incompleteness of contemporary character design not only offers the chance to write one’s own storyline—it demands it for any character’s success. As such, events like Pictoplasma’s Conference on Contemporary Character Design and Art represent a vanguard of a larger, interactive trend in the field. Begun in 2004 and now a biannual event in Berlin, the Pictoplasma conference drew over 1200 participants last fall, eager not just to meet and greet each other, but the characters themselves. If that strikes you as highly quixotic, you haven’t heard the half of it.

“At last year’s conference the PictoOrphanage invited anyone to adopt a graphical character and help it step into the real world—from its inception to birth and then to life,” Thaler says, apparently poker-faced. For a cool €300 (U.S.-$415), sponsors took home tearful birth certificates and sonograms of each character, and a promise of regular letters and invites to events starring their characters in the future. Thirty lucky “orphans” got outfitted by professional costume designers, imbuing the characters with enough physical get-up-and-go to serve as official conference hosts, star in their own dance pop-opera show and lead hipsters in a character karaoke party to close the conference. Adoptive “parents” now bide their time until the 2008 conference, at which they’ll be feted with VIP access and a candlelit dinner for two with their character-protégés. “The orphanage took Pictoplasma to a new level of seriousness, but it also revealed our ultra-pathetic side,” Thaler admits.

Still, Pictoplasma isn’t alone in thrusting 3D characters into live settings. Miami-based character designers Friends With You recently branched out into interactive installations, from huge character floats at Art Basel Miami, to adventure theme parks in local malls and Diesel Denim stores. The wildly successful Ugly Dolls characters came to life first as plush toys and now not only have their own international conference, Uglycon, but have appeared as incidental characters in music videos and TV shows.

As characters burst from the page or screen into 3D as figurines or plush toys, it’s not surprising that the next logical step towards further life and movement would have them calling for their own backdrops. “The industrial sterility of urban collector toys [and] the charm of plush dolls are other attempts to escape two dimensionality—fetishes in a Freudian sense, you could say,” Thaler muses.

A future extension of “real” life could be the invasion of character designs into Second Life and other virtual realities. “I’m not terribly interested in the recreation of the real world ... since the characters we’re interested in are not avatars or placeholders for humans, but rather their own life forms,” Thaler acknowledges. “Nevertheless, we do have a top-secret project that should launch late in 2007 ... [which] will be a nice tongue-in-cheek, ‘doodle’ version of Second Life.” Squirrel up your Linden dollars and await the revolution, kids.

PICTOPLASMA: THE CHARACTER ENCYCLOPAEDIA IS IN ITS THIRD EDITION, PUBLISHED FALL 2006.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
But the closer any creation comes to real life, the more life’s corollaries assert themselves: death and the hereafter. In an intriguing new development, Thaler and Denicke are observing the emergence of characters worldwide with a distinctly spiritual side.

“If you look at our latest publication, the Character Encyclopaedia, you’ll find page after page of all kinds of creatures exhaling their soul, characters grouping up for religious rituals or cute fluffy animals praying with tears in their eyes,” Thaler notes. “The interesting thing about this is that the motif has suddenly popped up in the last year and is being used by artists worldwide, from the Americas to Europe, Russia and Asia.”

Perhaps tellingly, Friends With You’s latest installations include the Get Lucky exhibit of altars, complete with deities in furry, white costumes that assess the visitor’s reverence and either bow in obeisance or charge forward in hilarious-yet-alarming attack. Thaler has also noticed a distinct life cycle among characters in the past decade, clearer evidence than ever that they are born, grow up and die. “No matter how easily decoded or how little controversial [these expressions of spirituality might be], isn’t it interesting that these spiritual contexts and religious references are suddenly being embraced by mainstream, commercial pop?” Thaler asks. Given the furious pace of character art’s own development, it makes sense that characters that appear in too many guises may exhaust their commercial and artistic appeal. Certainly after more than a decade, a shakeout of characters with staying power versus those who faded gracefully away seems inevitable.

In any event, Thaler and Denicke firmly believe character design will roll forward a good long while before hitting the final Nirvana. In fact, Thaler offers a tantalizing theory to explain the pull these inert little artifacts exert on so many of us. “For German art historian Hans Belting ... the corpse, being so radically different from the body while alive, was the first-ever image.” Thaler adds, quoting Belting, “‘Images, in place of the missing body, occupied the place deserted by the person who had died.’ As a tactile abstraction, dolls and fetishes transported the dead body into the realm of the image.”

Maybe it’s not so loopy to say these little characters help us penetrate some of life’s biggest mysteries: how babies grow into adults and escape into their own forms of freedom; how our parents age and leave us living; how the generations spool out endlessly from each other, echoing old similarities even as radical new traits enter the scene. It’s a concentric web of cycles that binds the whole planet together, a lot like—why not?—an ever-radiating Bunny Mandala.