COLLECTION 5 THE MALE - A FASHION SPECIAL!

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Steffen Sauerteig, Svend Smital and Kai Vermehr
are the three faces behind the Eboy collective: they met in 1996. Svend and
Steffen knew each other for quite some time, doing parties together in East
Berlin before the wall came down. Kai and Steffen were working together at
Metadesign, one of Germany‘s biggest design companies, also based in Berlin.
They started to do some gaming together and then somehow, the magic happened:
they decided to create pictures for computer screens, and that‘s how
Eboy was born. Playing with the limitations of the medium at the time, plus
a certain appeal for video games aesthetics, you‘ve most likely seen their art
in advertisements, galleries, illustrations without knowing that it was from
them. Personally, I am in total awe of their massive and very detailed pixelated
cityscapes. For all the pixel freaks who are reading us out there, it is said that
they have been storing every single element in one big database. If anybody
wants to break in, count me in (contact: operat10n.pixel.rob@kaltblut.de)
Sure, nowadays everything that is even remotely related to the nineties is totally
“hyped”. We‘re seeing pixel art everywhere, the proof is, I even personally
got a tattoo of the famous game “Space Invaders”. So proud. Amazingly
these three are still working together after all these years. Kai and Steffen live
and work in Vancouver, while Svend stayed in Berlin. Meeting in the morning
for a video chat session, they are using surprisingly top-notch communication
technology for their low-res art. I used what people call “the web” to get in
touch with the eBoy Team.
eReady. eSteady. eGO!
Interview by Nicolas Simoneau