TAKESHI MURATA UNTITLED: PINK DOT (2007)

Director: Takeshi Murata

Year: 2007

Time: 5 mins

Music: Robert Beatty

Eye of Sound: Set against a hypnotic crescendo of looped layers of high-pitched electro-bliss that sounds like something Ikeda and Aube would produce over a calm breakfast meeting under a soft summer breeze, Pink Dot is a somewhat less abrasive approach to the Murata trade-mark digital corruption wash. Some critics will have a lot to say about the pulsating pink/blue dot that keeps assaulting the screen, associating it with "the eye of perception" or "the viewer's ego", but Murata's force and relative popularity lies in the simple and almost brute force of his distortion apparatus and the constant game of hide and seek between figuration and abstraction that his source materials are forced into. In Pink Dot, Murata invites none other than John Rambo to his glitch chamber, making his ruthless enemies draw first blood in the swampy and moisty miasma of a pixeled war theatre where explosions created by lysergic grenades go pink and the jungle becomes an ectoplasmic aquarium in which the quintessential Vietnam anti-hero is camouflaged by his own digital irreality. There are no friendly civilians.

Dedicated to Comrade Yotte

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TAKESHI MURATA UNTITLED: SILVER (2006)

Director: Takeshi Murata

Year: 2006

Time: 11 mins

Music: Robert Beatty & Ellen Molle

Eye of Sound: Bound to annoy those who believe that modern art is nothing but a load of easy-to-do-you-can't-fool-me crap, Takeshi Murata's video works could be seen as the visual counterpart of the "glitch" slide in the music of the late 90s. Murata corrodes works by well-known directors, digitally corrupting their integrity and figurative nature to construct a mass of visual distortion in which the original material's screen action is sacrificed in the altar of plastic abstraction. In Silver, Murata drafts Mario Bava's gothic horror classic Mask of the Demon and submits it to his digital corrosion procedures so that we have nothing left but an ectoplasmic ghost of the film's heroin wandering through the dark pixel chambers of the haunted castle of computer corruption. Robert Beatty, known for his Three Legged Race and Hair Police projects, joins Ellen Molle to immerse the film in an bubbly electronic swamp charged with immersive drones, vapors and echoes, highlighting the screen's lysergic potential and drawing the viewer away from the original's horror intentions. There's nothing wrong with your screen, it's just a ghost in the machine.

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