Pulse Studio

Pulse has spent a decade making titles, tours and identities for artists who do not want to look like a brand. For their tenth year they asked for a public archive that felt like the studio at 1am — not a retrospective in a white room.

The brief

Four hundred projects, a physical exhibition in Kreuzberg, and a digital piece that had to work as a night you could send to someone who could not come. No timeline slider. No “our process”. Sound on, if you want it.

The work

We built a single scrolling night. Projects surface the way memories do: by colour, by a bar, by a year you almost remember. Type is loud, then gone. The exhibition identity and the site share one set of rules so the poster, the room and the phone all feel like the same evening.

Development had to hold film, stills and a live occupancy of the room — a small signal that told you if the exhibition was full. It is a gimmick we would not normally allow. In this case it was the point: the archive is a place, not a page.

It is the first time the studio has looked like itself on the internet. That is a strange sentence to write in year ten. Mira Kessler, Creative Director, Pulse

What changed

The exhibition ran six weeks. The site is still the studio’s homepage — they refused to put a “normal” one back. Inbound from artists doubled. The occupancy light is still on, even though the room is empty. Pulse likes it that way.