Pictoplasma '24 I
I spent this week at PIctoplasma character design and animation festival in Berlin. Pitco has long been one of my favourite festivals because of its emphasis on sharing work rather than ‘selling’ - so a trip there feels less like ‘work’ and more like an opportunity to see some inspiring work and meet some nice people.
Something that I found illuminating was the number of speakers that referred to their work in terms of playfulness. Thai artist Part Aniwat and Portuguese illustrator Ana Seixas; US animator Joe Bennett and Spanish designer/illustrator Genie Espinosa, all specifically described their work or their processes as playful. Joseph Melhuish, So Lazlo and Alex “Chippy” Futtersak all specifically referenced joy, freedom, fun, silliness. So play and playfulness really are hot topics, and key practices, for contemporary creative practitioners.
What wasn’t mentioned quite so much, though, was the conscious connection between playfulness and creativity or productivity - the reasons for being playful; the connection that playfulness has not just with the style of the art produced, but the way it is produced. In effect, the artists spoke more to the playfulness of their art than the playfulness of their practice.
Some of the artists talked about wanting to have fun in their work, but few connections were drawn between the conscious act of being playful and the resulting act of creativity. Perhaps I’m overreaching here, but it feels to me like there’s a lot of talk around playfulness and creativity, but not a lot of talk about what they are, what they mean or how we do them; it’s assumed that everyone knows what they are, or what they feel like. To an extent, this is probably true - we do all know what having fun feels like. But do we really know what being playful feels like? Not the act of play itself, but the mood, the attitude, the way of seeing the world that allows us to play?
When Parn Aniwat described his surprisingly strict daily and monthly routine, it struck me that he was describing the ‘rules’ that he creates that allow himself to be more creative. “Rules”, Aniwat said, “provide more mental space” to be creative (Aniwat 2024). For Aniwat it seems that rules provide or construct a mental magic circle (Huizinga 1949) that separates the creative practice from ‘real life’; they provide the space to be creative and, at the risk of conflating the two phenomena, playful.
Musing on this, it strikes me that there are two types of rules. There are the kind of rules like Aniwat sets himself - working only within certain hours of the day, doing a particular task on a particular day, etc. Then, there are more implicit or intrinsic rules we set for ourselves; rules we might not even realise we set. Alex Futtersak talked about the importance for fun to him in his making; he has to be entertained by his work in some form. It’s the same principle in making myself laugh - if I’m making myself laugh, I feel more creatively rewarded by my work. So, whether he knows it or not, perhaps that’s one of Futtersak’s unwritten ‘rules’ - to entertain himself, to find pleasure in it.
This perhaps is where plork can support practitioners - by making them more consciously aware of their own practices. Reflective, playful practice can help highlight day-to-day rules - “work finished at 6pm”, say - but can also help artists become more consciously aware of the rules that are important to them. For some artists, this might be about finding humour in their work; for some it’s the PLEX idea of Completion, of finishing a major task, of closure. For some, perhaps Completion isn’t important, and it’s more about a continuing experimental practice. Either way, there’s something compelling about being able to discern practical rules from personal ones.
One last thought. Something about this ties into the idea of Signature Pedagogies - not the teaching so much as the structure. If in teaching, there are Implicit (“a set of beliefs about professional attitudes, values”), Deep (“a set of assumptions about how best to [practice]”) and Surface (“concrete, operational acts”) (Shulman 2002, p54-55) structures, is the same not true of creative practice? It strikes me that when practitioners talk about playfulness, they’re almost referring to it as a “concrete, operational” act; as though being playful was the activity itself instead of something deeper. This thought needs more development, but I feel quite strongly that there is a connection between these things.
References
ANIWAT, P. Parn Aniwar - Wood You Like. Pictoplasma, 2024 Berlin.
HUIZINGA, J. 1949. *Homo ludens; a study of the play-element in culture, *London,, Routledge & K. Paul.
SHULMAN, L. S. 2005. Signature pedagogies in the professions. Daedalus, 134**,** 52-59.