characters , visual language

Working at den Haag Today"s art festival was quite an expirience first because you get into the Rush that an festival can generate second because you get to know the artists that are producing the works that are presented in the estival , and the third reason is related to the concept of the art works you can understand thing much better by beeing in a close touch with the artists that are produceing the exibited works . After seeing and building , partigipateing , taking directions from the artist that is exibiting you get in sight the ideea of what he wants to transmitt with the work that he is produceing and showing . In a lot of cases the explanations are not enough to describe an art work , you have to get in contact with the person that is making the things , why I think that this is important is because a huge question is related to the understanding of works that are showed in modern and contemporary museums by the visitor , sometimes people do not know what they see as viewer and in a lot of cases they get a totaly different ideea about what things really supposed to be or mean .
At the festival I worked closely with the Pictoplasma team from Berlin (http://www.pictoplasma.com/) that are focused on characters and animations , colecting and publishing material about characters that are found generaly in graffity art , street art , stencils and short animations . What was interesting about this group is the fact that they are bassicaly collectors and are colecting characters from the urban counciosness that is refleceted in the graffiti and street art in general . This collection that was published under the form of a book with the character colection arranged according to the tipes of caracters and their place of belonging .
I think that this kind of collection is pretty important especialy in a moment when culture in general is shifting from a classical tipe of culture where things where regarded in a traditional way to a new tipe of culture that has as a core the visual .
The new way in witch the street artists or designers are experssing themselves is related to advertising , color , motion and abstract . These elements enforce the fact that more and more the tipicla of an urban enviroment is related to visual language and culture , i see this colection as a colection of characters that are part of an language that is known only in certain groups of artists , theyr meaning is hidden from the normal cityzen , this fact transforming graffity and street art in a sort of a subclture that strives towoards free expresion and not necesarily adverising .
visual language is slowly taking over the classical culture , the information that we recive as viewers , citizentz or shoppers are much more structured in the latest years that is because the overlap that has happened in the last few years connected to the transition fron a consumer society to an informational society , so information is given to us bigger and bigger quantities so the speed of comprehation is becomming faster . This fact forces things to be transmitted in a new way that is the visual way , the visual language that is speciffic from city to city in the case of street art and graffity , in the case of media things become different media beeing a broad thing that is happening everywhere so the impact is on a different level .
pictoplasma enciclopey is analizing these characters trough a postmodern lens focusing on things that outherviese would escape from the untraind eye .