PV interview 4 Prestage Magazine

Could you tell us someting about Pinar&Viola?
From the streets of the internet. Totalitarian and decadent. In love since 3 years. Allergic to nostalgia and to people who depict luxury with white on black.

How would you two describe your work?
The description is written by Erika Spray, commissioned by Etapes Magazine: “Pinar&Viola, formed by Pinar Demirdag and Viola Renate, is an independent graphic design duo which creates hyper detailed surfaces by ‘scanning’ the contemporary visual culture, and ‘printing’ ecstatic surfaces in return. Colossal visual gestures, hyper intricate detail and excessive embellishment fill their collaged designs to the brim. The highly artificial character of Pinar&Viola’s work testifies thе ‘flat’ media sphere made up of solely recycled material. By transposing, fusing and altering its elements, they aim to subvert conventional compositions. These notions all collapse into one single surface of visual insatiability and informational intensity.”

Can you tell us something about some of the work you have done in the past?
Every time we have a new ecstatic surface design commissioned, it’s always dramatically different. We so far made commissioned artworks for Stedelijk & Cobra Museum, made patterns for fashion designers, a cover and video for Diplo, a porn site, company video for a technological company which makes eyes for cyborgs, stained glass windows for a synagogue.. Which sometimes creates a daily oximoron in our outfit choices for meetings with clients. Few times, we had a meeting planned in the same day with a rabbi and the porn site client. Next to our commissioned practice, every year we launch an autonomous graphic design collection that are called Ecstatic Surface Collections. So far we launched The Credit card Collection 2011 and Diva Opaque: Anonymous Guardians of Intimacy 2012. We see these collection as the haute couture garments of our design practice, where we reflect on the contemporary, while imagining fictive scenarios for the future.

What is your work process like?
We both separately make a research around the theme, later on come together and start composing text files which seek for one notion / idea / image which will tingle our minds and will make us fantasize. We continue searching until we both find an idea which makes our hear beat stop for a second. We create separately for a little while, and come back together in order to start the ping-pong game. The file is transferred between our screens until it’s hand crafted a la haute couture. In that stage if we both like the result, that means that something is majorly wrong. We both need to be disturbed by the image somehow. It should be sexy yet monstrous in the same time. Sometimes, even if all the ingredients are in there, the image is still not convincing. We call the unnamed missing element the ‘the x-effect’. Our surfaces are composed of so many layers that if one thing is extra or missing, it would easily look ‘off’ or misunderstood.

Do you think your work has any drawbacks?
From hours of digital craftsmanship, we both have RSI, repetitive stress injury, also known as the mouse sickness among folk. I guess we weren’t clever when we decided to restore the dignity of ornament and decoration without the crippling weight of nostalgia.

What do you love most about your work?
Everything! From scanning the digital, contemporary, folk, cultures, to print special edition, custom-made fanatical, overloaded, sedusive yet confronting surfaces. From updating our blog where we display our fascinations and fantasies, to hours of despair when we are looking for an idea. But I guess where we have the most fun is when we have a tight deadline and we wish a day is 50 hours, not 24. There, we go to our summer house in Amsterdam, and stay there for couple of days / a week where we feed ourselves with peanut butter, chocolate and energy drink and play ping-pong with digital files. And the thing which is less heart-lifting is the opening or the launch of a new project. We are the only ones bored in the room, thinking “What is next?”.

You have a rather unique style of art that you create. Tell us about it, and how you developed it.
We consider style a nostalgic visual reference, used in a situation where the context is over imposed to its content. Beyond style, each surface of ours embrace a different message that we keen on delivering. Even though a general over-loaded, flamboyant, disorienting and ecstatic etiquette might be placed, throughout its content, elements outshining the surface differs. It was right before we started our practice, at Sandberg Instituut, that we decided to create ecstatic surfaces as a rejection of the standardization and democratization of design and it’s software, making the ‘hand-crafted’ originality vanish. More politically speaking, our surfaces are a commentary on the dominant rigid Western modernistic ‘outfit’ and suggested return to decorative traditions a statement about the relationship between Western and non-Western cultures.

What was your first contact with art?
Pinar: It was the beginning of my teenagehood, mum was holding a Pirelli Calendar. She replied “It’s Art” when I asked her why she was staring at naked women. After seeing my eyes devoid of content, she later added that it will take time for me to understand the difference between Art and naked women. As impatient as a kid on energy drink, in my path to understand Art, I did everything to fast forward the time with the pre-googleian research tools of 90s. Viola: The first art in my live was my mother’s art and her craftsmanship skills. Thanks to her multi-talents I was surrounded with sculptures, paintings, early computer drawings, embroideries and woodworkings starting from day one. Obviously my first cudly toy was made by her.

What is the driving force behind your inspiration?
Strategies, notions, ideologies, subcultures, technology, behaviors, etc which reflects the year where we live in. From creative hair etchings to self-made internet ghetto gold vedettes; from celebrities attacking paparazzis to luxurious orthodox religious accessories; from low in luxury usb pendants to high in decadence, diamonds engraved in credit cards; from electronic cigarettes to food art; from Steve Job’s monotone clothing style to Ghaddafi’s decadent dictator wardrobe, etc. Basically, we take our inspiration from contemporary conflicts, paradoxes, oxymorons, ironies, optimizations, fanatics, disorders, powers, esoterics, counter glamour and the heat of the info glut. We also prefer to be transparent about our inspiring sparks and muses. We have a blog, www.pinar-viola.com/blog, where we upload our found treasures. They are all results of our online and offline (in real life) trips, while traveling with our ‘ecstatic radar’ switched on.

Has there been a particular project or client you found to be the highlight of your career so far?
Yes, it’s the fist ecstatic video we did. In beginning December, we were negotiating with Mad Decent boys, for a possible music video, based on the cover artwork we did for Diplo. The thing is, we preferred not to communicate that we haven’t put a static image in motion so far. Meanwhile, we got an assignment to make an ‘artistic’ promotion video for a spanish technology company making chips for cyborgs’ eyes. Yes, we’re kind of an glam-odd-magnet when it comes to assignments. No one believed that we could pull off a hyper filled 3min video in less than a month, not mentioning that we never made a video before, and that Pinar had RSI (repetitive stress injury) during the entire month. This assignment, Vera Focus, made us realize that we’d love to be drawn in the endless ocean wide world of video making, the next best thing in our practice.

Do you believe in a secret to success?
We don’t think it’s any secret. Be stubborn, obsessed, driven, in love with what you do, dedicate all your time, remix your privileges, not take no as an answer, take action in a moment when nobody expects, work harder than any urban-myth-hard-working-youngster story you heard, and have at least one person in the world who aggress with you.

Is there something you’d like to achieve?
As everything else, when it comes to our aims, they are also over-loaded. We aim to blur the line between art and design, to put spotlights on graphic design among its sister creative practices, to put back the dignity of ornamentation, to be able to have an intellectual discussion around the end 20th-and-beginning-21st-century forbidden-art-critic-word ‘beauty’, and to be 75 years old and still working together.