Central's pixel PLAYGROUND

CENTRAL FESTIVAL Eastville’s first claim to fame – as well as being Bangkok’s newest mall – is that it’s championing the bright but little-known genre of “pixel art”. Berlin-based trio eBoy has created a huge digital panorama of the mall and its Lat Phrao surroundings using nothing but pixels.
Kai Vermehr, Svend Smital and Steffen Sauerteig, who formed eBoy in 1997, have been hailed as the “godfathers of pixels”, though they readily admit that the form was born in video games.
“Pixel art came from games like Nintendo and uses that same aesthetic effect, but it’s only in the last 10 years that it’s been called pixel art,” Vermehr said at the mall’s grand opening. “We didn’t invent the method, but we were among the first to popularise it.”
The “method” involves drawing images with lines and then building them up, pixel by pixel, using graphics software. Back at the dawn of the personal-computer age, Vermehr said, this was the usual way to publish artwork on the Internet.
“We wanted to use computers to make art and publish art, and pixels provided a good way to do it. It’s a very natural way to work on the computer screen and requires very little – only PhotoShop and a pen tool. I can create something and Sven and Steffen can build layers and layers on top of it, which accommodates our style of working too since we work at different places and times.”
Pop culture, TV commercials for toys, Lego building blocks and of course computer games have provided the inspiration for eBoy, who’ve gained a global cult following. Their complex illustrations appear (and in some cases are) three-dimensional, filled with robots, cars, guns and girls. They’ve been printed on posters and shirts and featured in gallery exhibitions.
Their latest projects are plastic Peecol playthings like Kidrobot and a line of wooden toys.
“We were surprised that children like our work,” Sauerteig said. “I guess one of the reasons pixel art resonates in the modern world is that everything is now digital. You used to take photos with a digital camera and people would ask, ‘Are you sure you don’t want a print copy of that?’ But now it’s the other way round.”
Soon after they got together, a Japanese magazine invited eBoy to help make a pixel-art rendering of Tokyo. There have been many “pixoramas” since then, including Paris, Berlin and London.
“Doing a cityscape is great fun,” said Vermehr. “I do some buildings and they do some and we join them together to make a big picture. It’s also fun to see how other people perceive a particular city. You can move things around and, because we use isometric perspective, the scaling is always the same size, wherever the objects are in the picture. It’s very flexible and very much like when you’re building a real city.
“I like art a lot, but sometimes fine art can be very exclusive,” he said. “You have to be educated to understand and appreciate fine art, and I understand why. But it’s great to have just an instinctive relation to art. You just see it and you know you like it. Just like music, you don’t need to be educated about art to like it. The fact that ordinary people like our work just because they can connect to it makes us very happy, and that keeps us inspired and motivated.”

There’s no charge for having a gander at eBoy’s “Bangkok Escape” at Central Festival Eastville on Praditmanoontham Road. It’s on view indefinitely.
Find out more about the artists at www.eBoy.com.