eBoy, an art collective founded in 1998 by Steffen Sauerteig, Svend Smital and Kai Vermehr, build their artwork pixel by pixel. Their work makes intense use of popular culture and commercial icons, and their style is presented in three-dimensional isometric illustrations filled with robots, cars, guns and girls. Their unique style has gained them a cult following among graphic designers worldwide, as well as a long list of commercial clients, such as Coca-Cola, MTV, VH1, Adidas and Honda.

eBoy were chosen to take part in our 'Watch This Space 2' exhibition by Mark Frauenfelder, editor of MAKE magazine and co-founder of Boing Boing.

It’s easy to imagine the artist collective known as eBoy living inside an isometric universe, building their candy-coloured cathedrals with an infinite warehouse of Lego bricks. The magic of eBoy’s art is that while each blocky element is in plain view, the overall effect is mysterious and powerful. With a handful of pixels they can capture the likeness of a celebrity, or recreate smoke, transparent gems, shadows, skin tones, and reflections.

eBoy’s subject matter is immediately appealing to me, having grown up with Mad magazine, Wacky Packages, Rat Fink, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Hot Wheels, Tonka, punk rock, comic books, Star Trek, Playboy, and the Atari 2600. Their art, especially their eCities posters (a series that interprets famous cities as pixel-perfect busy metropolises), is brimming with what Mad artist William Elder called ‘chicken fat’: little surprise details hiding everywhere. It adds up to a visual cornucopia delivers a pay off every time you come back for another look. It’s as if the eCities changed over time. How else to explain the sudden appearance of machine gun robots with naked girl tattoos, spherical aquariums suspended from ceilings, whales with human arms sticking out of their mouths, and splashes of graffiti on the sides of crumbling tenements, when you didn’t see them last time you looked?

eBoy conjures up the giddy excitement of a buzzing Berlin, the optimism of man as technologist, and the belief - despite our propensity as a species to make really dumb mistakes - that life is awesome."

– Mark Frauenfelder


Mark Frauenfelder is a weblogger, illustrator, and journalist. He is editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and co-founder of the influential collaborative weblog Boing Boing.
www.boingboing.net www.makezine.com