Takeshi Murata is an American contemporary artist who creates digital media artworks using video and computer animation techniques. In 2007 he had a solo exhibition, ''Black Box: Takeshi Murata'', at the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was des ...
in Washington, D.C. His 2006 work "Pink Dot" is in the Hirshhorn's permanent collection, and his 2005 work "Monster Movie" is in the permanent collection of the
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...
. His 2013 short film "OM Rider" was selected to screen as an animated short film at the 2015
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival (formerly Utah/US Film Festival, then US Film and Video Festival) is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,66 ...
.
Background and influences
Murata's parents are both architects, which he said has given him an awareness of the spaces around him. He says that focusing on animation as his medium was a natural direction for him:
I've always loved cartoons, and when I finally saw experimental animation, and what independent artists were making outside of the studio system, I knew it's what I wanted to do. The combination of the studios art, in time, with sound, and having the illusionary powerful icto create immersive narrative spaces, is exciting. I still love it.
Murata also cites horror movies as an influence.
Works and reception
Key works completed by Murata in the mid-2000s exploited the introduction of distortions to previously recorded videos, a practice commonly found in
glitch art
Glitch art is the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. Glitches appear in visual art such as the film ''A Colour Box'' (1935) by Len Lye, ...
. "Monster Movie," "Untitled (Silver)," and "Untitled (Pink Dot)," all made between 2005 and 2007, share this characteristic.
A 2009 article in
Artforum
''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...
about Murata's art noted that "the artificial palette, flashing lights, abstract patterns, and coarsely pixelated texture of Pink Dot and other works by Murata locate him in the tradition of electronic animation pioneered by John Whitney and
Lillian Schwartz
Lillian F. Schwartz (born 1927) is an American artist considered a pioneer of computer-mediated art and one of the first artists notable for basing almost her entire oeuvre on computational media. Many of her ground-breaking projects were done in t ...
. But while his predecessors were testing the computer's ability to replicate the cinematic illusion of movement, Murata uses the tools of consumer-level film-editing software to undo that illusion, with trails of pixel dust tracking the changing positions of the image from frame to frame.".
"Monster Movie"
Display notes for the work "Monster Movie" in the 2015 Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition ''Watch This! Revelations in Media Art'' state:
"Monster Movie" is a mesmerizing digital video projection with an aggressive audio track. Murata sourced video from the 1981 B-movie ''Caveman,'' and beginning with a process called datamoshing, mixed it into a kind of digital liquid. Much as aphael MontañezOrtiz punched holes in
16mm film
16 mm film is a historically popular and economical gauge of film. 16 mm refers to the width of the film (about inch); other common film gauges include 8 and 35 mm. It is generally used for non-theatrical (e.g., industrial, educ ...
stock, Murata punched virtual holes through the compressed video file, disrupting the video's logic and revealing a monster beneath the surface of the video, inside the digital script."
Untitled (Silver)
A 2006 review of Murata's work "Untitled (Silver)" stated: "A main part of Murata's technique involves digitally compressing the footage so that the movement of a series of frames is reduced to a single twitching image that records only the net difference in movement from one frame to the next. Ironically, this high-tech wizardry recalls old-fashioned animation and moving-picture precedents such as
flipbook
A flip book, flipbook, flicker book, or kineograph is a booklet with a series of images that very gradually change from one page to the next, so that when the pages are viewed in quick succession, the images appear to animate by simulating moti ...
s,
zoetrope
A zoetrope is one of several pre-film animation devices that produce the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of that motion. It was basically a cylindrical variation of the phénak ...
s and
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge (; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904, born Edward James Muggeridge) was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first ...
's motion studies. The video's visual effects also evoke the way
Impressionist
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage ...
painters broke down images into brushwork and blurriness, which similarly gave way to abstraction. For his part, Murata likens the liquid look of his digital distortions to the physical deterioration of old film stock."
"I, Popeye"
Since 2010, Murata has also created artworks that exploit the
hyperreality
Described by Jean Baudrillard, the concept of hyperreality captures the inability to distinguish "The Real" (a term borrowed from Jacques Lacan) from the signifier of it. This is more prominent in technologically advanced societies. Hyperreality ...
achievable with the use of digital rendering. "I, Popeye," a parodic twist on the original
Popeye
Popeye the Sailor Man is a fictional cartoon character created by E. C. Segar, Elzie Crisler Segar. Critic Lauren Cornell writes:
At the time it was made, the copyright for the original cartoon character had expired in the EU but remained in effect in the United States: a highly anachronistic situation—especially given the boundlessness of contemporary culture—and one that inspired Murata to test the blurry grounds of
fair use
Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests ...
. He used the cartoon's original cast but, their entanglements are too abject and too contemporary to be mistaken for the real thing—for instance, in one scene, a remorseful Popeye visits
Bluto
Bluto, at times known as Brutus, is a cartoon and comics character created in 1932 by E. C. Segar, Elzie Crisler Segar as a one-time character, named "Bluto the Terrible", in his ''Thimble Theatre'' comic strip (later renamed ''Popeye''). Blut ...
in the hospital as he recovers from an apparent assault; in another, Popeye wistfully lays flowers on
Olive Oyl
Olive Oyl is a cartoon character created by E. C. Segar in 1919 for his comic strip ''Thimble Theatre''. The strip was later renamed ''Popeye'' after the sailor character that became the most popular member of the cast; however, Olive Oyl was a ...
's grave. While it is conceptually consistent with his earlier work, in that he uses emergent software and digital technologies to subvert commercial perfection and create disorder, "I, Popeye" was his first foray into representational animation, a direction that he has continued in vastly more complex narratives, such as "OM Rider" (2014)."
''Synthesizers'' and "Night Moves"
The 2013 exhibition ''Synthesizers'' at Salon 94 in New York included seven large-scale pigment prints depicting interior spaces populated with objects that were either created with computer graphics or by using stock images found online, together with the video "Night Moves," created jointly with Billy Grant. According to a contemporaneous review by Brienne Walsh, "Night Moves" features
the studio's interior, rendered in three dimensions by combining scanned photographs of the space. Objects lifted from the scans and animated on the computer—a pink nightgown, a desk chair, a tripod—pulsate, sway, liquefy and occasionally start maniacally laughing. Continually shattering into prismatic shards that reassemble into unified forms, the environment finally dissolves into a flurry of fragments....Night Moves is a sophisticated amalgam of these two facets of his work, the abstract and the narrative."
"OM Rider"
Murata's digitally animated short film "OM Rider" was described as "funny and weird" in a New York Times review of the artwork's display at
Salon 94
Salon 94 is an art gallery in New York City owned by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.
History East 94th Street
The gallery opened in 2003 in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood on New York City’s Upper East Side as an integral part of Jeanne Greenberg Roha ...
in New York in December 2014. The two main characters are "a restless, punk werewolf in a black T-shirt and cutoff shorts, and a grumpy old man who is bald, but for wispy white hair hanging down below his ears," who eventually end up fighting each other.
Murata and the film's sound designer Robert Beatty discussed the inspiration and process of making "OM Rider" in an interview for the podcast Bad at Sports in December 2013. According to Murata, "I've always loved horror movies, so I thought that he Ratio 3space could be really cinematic and tried to transform the gallery by blacking it out. It was a perfect opportunity to go in this direction."
"Melter 3-D"
Murata's digitally animated kinetic sculpture "Melter 3-D" captivated visitors to the Frieze New York Art Fair in May 2014. As reported in the New York Times,
For technical magic, nothing beats Takeshi Murata's "Melter 3-D." In a room lit by flickering strobes, a revolving, beachball-size sphere seems made of mercury. A hypnotic wonder, it appears to be constantly melting into flowing ripples."
Murata created this illusion by projecting digital animation onto a rotating sphere, with the spinning of the sphere synchronized with the blinking of a strobe light. This makes it a form of 3D-zoetrope. According to Liz Stinson, writing in ''Wired'':
Murata was able to take the same principles used centuries ago to create repeating zoetrope animations, and add some high-tech gloss. He started by designing the object on his computer with 3-D modeling software. The looping melting effect you see is the result of syncing the spinning of the sphere with the blinking of the strobe. "It's the same concept as old cylindrical zoetropes, where you look through the slits to see the animation," says Murata. "But in a 3-D zoetrope, the slits are replaced with strobe lights, and drawings or photographs can become objects."
Institutional survey
In June 2015, the Kunsthall Stavanger in
Stavanger
Stavanger (, , American English, US usually , ) is a city and municipalities of Norway, municipality in Norway. It is the fourth largest city and third largest metropolitan area in Norway (through conurbation with neighboring Sandnes) and the a ...
,
Norway
Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...
put on the first institutional survey of Murata's work, comprising his digital animations and photographic prints.