hailing from Riverside, California the amazing duo came to Berlin to speak and participate in Pictoplasma, a festival and conference celebrating character design. after stopping by the KUNSTHALLE, they noticed our empty wall and saw an opportunity to leave their mark in the best way possible.

and what they left is nothing short of amazing.

two artists with very distinct styles, Jeff Soto and Maxx242 synchronized to compose a piece that embodies contradictions while maintaining balance. Soto’s owl rests gracefully upon a tentacle of Maxx242’s octopus. the dark creatures, symbolizing both wisdom and mystery, are illuminated by bursts of blue and a rusty orange. the viewer stands in awe by the sheer size, realism, and quality of the piece. this collaboration was crafted with a kind of eloquence only feasible for graffiti masters and best friends, Maxx242 and Jeff Soto.

Maxx242 and Jeff Soto met as young teenagers in California and twenty years later they have a friendship that has outlasted most marriages. like most teenage boys, they shared a mutual interest in comic books and skateboard culture. they grew up exposed to the same art, had the same teachers, and were products of a character driven culture. despite differing cultural background and upbringings, the pair forged an enduring friendship.

as they grew up, Jeff was able to go to school to study graphic design. as Jeff grew an interest in books, Maxx dived into the real world, gaining experience doing professional work and being successful enough to avoid serving burgers to make ends meet.

while Maxx and Jeff took very different paths in life, today they are both internationally regarded as artists who define a genre. they have seen the genre develop, as well as experienced the varying degrees of urban art acceptance. to paint a mural in their hometown, they would need to go before a board, propose their sketches, pay 500 dollars, and wait to get permission to do their craft. here, all they had to do here was bring some paint and get busy.

the two believe Europe has “always been more artistic than the states.” back home, cities view graffiti not as artistic expression, but as vandalism. they prioritize removing it and invest heavily in graffiti task forces to repaint over everything. Maxx even said, “most of Jeff’s big walls are in Europe” simply because people are more accepting and they have more “freedom to paint.”

this freedom is not limited to graffiti masters, it is open to anyone with a can of spray-paint. for Jeff and Maxx someone tagging a piece they’ve spent four to five days working on is an inevitable part of graffiti culture. according to Jeff, “if local writers don’t like it, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. it sucks, stings a little but as long as you get a good photo, I’m okay with it.”

before anyone takes this as an open invitation to write over his piece in neon letters, consider the unwritten golden rule of graffiti art: if you can’t do better, don’t touch it. graffiti isn’t just about writing your name everywhere, it’s about taking something banal, something we see everyday and transforming it into a canvas for art with a style that evokes emotion and makes you think. graffiti is both a style and an art form.

if you missed Maxx242 and Jeff Soto while they were in town for Pictoplasma, don’t worry! they’ll be back to the fatherland on november 7th for show in Nuremberg. till then you can swing by PLATOON KUNSTHALLE Berlin to be mesmerized by their epic mural.

and if you’re gonna tag it, do it better.

you read that right.

MANMADE. SATELLITE. 

not only did the south korean native successfully launch something into space, a triumph that has only ever been accomplished by either the government or military, he made the satellite by himself without the modern luxuries of computers or machines. he even made the instructions available to the public so that anyone can build and operate a satellite of their own.

his global orbiting device, or GOD, is the first comsat designed and financed by a private citizen to reach orbit. this masterpiece of diy engineering contains a solar cell, a lithium-ion battery (the kind you can find in your cellphone), a modified arduino board that can withstand cosmic rays, and four led lights that are powerful enough to be seen from earth. to communicate with GOD, Hojun uses a communication device that transmits morse code messages that are visible to an entire hemisphere.

by now, you’re probably wondering how he managed to pay for this project. Hojung raised the nearly 10,000 euros by selling t-shirts. compared to NASA’s budgets, this is like someone selling lemonade at 25 cents a cup to buy a house.

the goal of his open source satellite initiative is to empower and inspire the individual to develop a private connection with the universe. the success of this diy satellite project proves that the cosmos are available to everyone, not just large institutions. surpassing the barriers to enter the cosmos is no longer a fantasy. space is not as distant as we think.

so what are you waiting for?

BERLIN/NEW YORK · character design is nothing new. behind every cave painting, every hieroglyph, and every greek myth there is a glimmer of character design. character design is the process of defining a figure. it is the appearance, personality, and ethos of a figure. it is what brings a character to life.

despite the deep-rooted history, character design only recently became a field of study. with the boom of the internet came a new form of figurative design. born of pixels and vectors, character icons were on every website. spreading rapidly through cyberspace, these data featherweights made their way across the globe much faster than any photo-realistic image could.

the surge of colorful icons in cyberspace enriched a new digital culture. a culture so vivacious it attracted an animator frustrated by a lackluster industry, named Peter Thaler to begin researching the icons littered across the web. eventually he began organizing these icons as well, classifying them by motif, country of origin, style, and name of the designer.

from this labor of love came pictoplasma.com and in 1999 it was the first extensive collection and archive of contemporary character design. a collection so rich it led to the release of best-selling publications that introduced the digital movement to the real world.

in the midst of the momentum, Lars Denicke had the idea to move the movement into reality and in 2004 Pictoplasma became the first festival-slash-conference to celebrate contemporary character design and art.

Pictoplasma has grown since the first festival in Berlin, and now the festival is also in New York, with Pictoplasma exhibitions spanning the globe. all of these outlets, as Lars describes, provide an occasion to "step back, rethink things, and attempt to make the aesthetics and theory of character design accessible to a broader audience".

Pictoplasma exists to free character representation from the commercial and narrative context and focus on the creators behind the images. it gives the artists a space to openly investigate the relationship between images and reality, as well as create an immersive, hands-on, experience for the attendees.

Lars sees Pictoplasma as a "platform to comprehend the various disciplines that fall under the label of character design." considering the ubiquitous nature of character design, this encompasses everything from illustration and graphic design to fashion and motion graphics. this range of disciplines attracts a diverse audience with manifold of interests; the only similarity being a thirst for inspiration and an openness to embrace and explore the unknown.

as the character design movement progressed, street art also became more accessible with the introduction of figurative characters. figurative street art developed as a parallel movement to character design. for both movements, the internet served as a catalyst allowing artists to showcase their work and gain exposure. shortly there after, the figures broke out of the 2d as designer toys. the figures were suddenly tangible, fulfilling a longing for something touchable, yet still boldly graphic.

these toys were then translated into costumes. finally, the characters that had only existed behind a screen broke the fourth wall and were inhabiting the real, bodily world. since then, artists have taken a much stronger conceptual approach by creating installations and designing entire world systems and environments for their characters; comprehensive fantasy worlds that question our concepts of reality.

Pictoplasma has seen the development of character design from the very beginning and continue to facilitate its growth. currently, they are preparing projects that promote cross-discipline collaborations to merge character design with neurologists and robotics.

this year's theme is "white noise" and will examine how a figure can reach the viewer on an emotional level and how our society contextualizes this quality within the current inflation of endless imagery.

do artistically conceived characters add, amplify, or restructure the "ballooning flow of images" or could they serve as a facade? as Lars phrases, is it a "glitch within the white noise"? Pictoplasma will examine these questions and with the lineup of speakers they are sure to give us something to think about.

this five-day conference will feature over twenty exhibitions, screenings, performances and have a few sweet parties as well. PLATOON KUNSTHALLE Berlin will serve as a central point of the program as host this year's character lab, where attendees and speakers come together from spontaneous doodle sessions, workshops, and art performances.

the Berlin based IMAGO1:1 is the world's largest walk in portrait camera. it's the only camera in the world that takes life-size black and white portraits that are exposed on direct positive paper. it's the same analogue photography concept found on every photoautomat, but on a much larger scale.

the IMAGO1:1 was created in the 1970s by Erhard Hößle and Werner Kraus. people step into it, click the shutter, and after ten minutes a 60 cm by 200 cm black and white self portrait in true ratio of 1:1 pops out. since there are no negatives or digital data, every "Imagogram" is a unique moment captured on high quality paper. at the time, the IMAGO1:1 was an absolute success until the special photosensitive direct positive paper went out of production in the 1980s. with the primary fuel no longer available, the machine became a relic and was put in storage.

thirty years later the inventors daughter, Susanna Kraus, accidentally stumbled on a forgotten box of old film. a year later and through a joint venture with Ilford Switzerland and Harman Technology the special paper the IMAGO1:1 needed was back in production!

since bringing life back to the IMAGO1:1, Susanna Kraus has taken over 500 photos, exhibiting them in cities all over Europe and now she wants to make her father's dream a reality by making the camera mobile.

the next hurdle was making the one and a half ton antique machine mobile. with the help of her two sons Jakob and Paul, Susanna designed the IMAGOphotour, the travel version of the IMAGO1:1. constructed out of modern materials and designed specifically for travel, this newly contrived portable version of the IMAGO1:1 could connect people from all over the world with this truly fantastic camera!

her goal is to raise 110,000 euros by mach 22nd to make the IMAGOphotour a reality and bring the camera around the world! if you want to have your very own life size photo, you can donate to Susanna's project on Kickstarter!

CONTRIBUTED BY MIMI ATOR

when one thinks of composting, the first thing that comes to mind is garbage disposal. this is actually not that far fetched:Upon entering the big conference room K1 at HKW the first thing that leaps to the eye is a huge basin with soil is set up next to a set of gloves, equipped with sensors, entangled with tons of cables which are connected to controllers: the heavily improvised looking equipment mounts up to a complex cycle, connecting four artists through states of matter.PLATOON team visited this jar dropping installation at transmediale 2013: composting the net/composting the city.

Shu Lea Cheang, artist, conceptualistkicked of this almost poetic approach to composting. together with audio earth recorder Martin Howse, Ayumi Matsuzaka, renown composter and Tikul, multimedia artist and platoon artist resident 'composting' is taken in its most expanded sense. not only actual compost is transformed at this years transmediale, but whole data archives are "composted" into soundscapes and all visitors were invited to join the succession by donating their waste, may it be hair, nails or even urin.While Ayumi was collecting the waste and planting it into the soil, Martin reverberated the moisture and electricity and Tikul and Shu Lea translated web data into frequencies and voices. Outwardly dead data was, through the action of digital worms, transformed into fresh sprouts that refused to be buried.

Shu Lea is certainly a pioneer in the field: her collaborative approach creates a durational, repetitive and generative cycle, a natural process, recycling historical representation to create something new. The outcome of this undertaking is jarring through the room, resulting in general speechlessness among the audience, once again reconfirming the extraordinary nature of the festival itself.
another special is the installation set up in the main hall of HKW: big yellow cylindrical tubes are intertwined with the impressive architecture of Haus der kulturen der welt. Together with the Telekommunisten the transmediale team has set up a huge pipe post system, connecting the different rooms and locations with each other. The best thing about it? You can literally see and hear the messages floating and slipping through the system.

undoubtedly, this years transmediale was ambitious as ever: BWPWAP- Back When Pluto Was A Planet is the extraterrestrial subline of this year festival for media and and digital culture. we are in the year 2006: the international astronomic union officially reduces the number of planets to 8, making pluto a dwarf planet with the official name 134340. BWPWAP instantly became an analogy for things that have recently changed. but transmediale is not motivated by nostalgia, it is about the discovery of untapped possibilities of analog media that has been forgotten in the glimpse of an eye.

being part of resource: transmediale vorspiel the architecture of PLATOON was turned into an urban projection unit, developed by Tikul and Jendrek (Pussykrew visual collective) during their residency. what a strangely beautiful experience, we are already excited about whats awaiting us at next years transmediale!

CONTRIBUTED BY JOHANNA T. WALLENBORN