Monster Movie

Takeshi Murata and Christopher Rutledge continue their playful investigation of both the sharp-edged hyperrealism of commercial CGI and its oozing, anarchic breakdown in Larry, which propels its titular character—a droopy-eyed canine baller—through a series of increasingly bizarre and messy loops. Set to a soundtrack of maxed-out electronic rhythms, these vignettes form a ludic study in morphology and motion, as its pooch protagonist continually vaults, multiplies, gets buckets, and dissolves into digital goo.

In Untitled (Pink Dot), Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood (1982) into a morass of seething electronic abstraction. Subjected to Murata's meticulous digital reprocessing, the action scenes decompose and are subsumed into an almost palpable, cascading digital sludge, presided over by a hypnotically pulsating pink dot.

Asep is young religious Sundanese Moslem man. He lives with his father who still works as a shaman in his village. When his father accepts more people who need spiritual, a mysterious man appears in Asep’s dreams.

In this animated video Shiboogi, American artist Takeshi Murata transforms TV commercials from the 1980s that he had discovered by chance in a record store in Japan. Just as commercials pop up on television screens for 30 seconds and then fade from memory, the imagery used by Murata pixelates and melts into a colorful digital sea. Takeshi Murata produces extraordinary digital works that build upon the experience of animation. His innovative practice and processes range from intricate computer-aided, hand-drawn animations to manipulating the flaws, defects and broken code in digital video technology. He alters appropriated footage from vintage horror films, commercials and movies, and creates fields of color, form and motion, redefining the boundaries between abstraction and recognition.

In Takeshi Murata's video, in collaboration with Billy Grant, computer generated scans are utilized to recreate his every day environment in high tech 3D. The video starts in his studio, where his computer, desk and chair are “haunted” - dissolving and reforming in a myriad of mirrored shapes, going from recognizable to abstract to obliterated. The scans blend with Murata’s own computer rendered fragments, further emphasizing the high and low, real and unreal. The result can be seen as an homage to both Walt Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio.

A strip mall becomes a cosmic fractal.

A collection of extraordinary animated short films from around the world, curated by Don Hertzfeldt. Released exclusively to movie theaters to support independent animators, the program includes “Martyr’s Guidebook”, “Zoon”, “The Hill Farm”, “I Am Alone and My Head is On Fire”, “Wednesday with Goddard”, “Jesus 2”, “The Big Snit”, “Untitled Line Drawings” (never-before-seen work by Bruce Bickford), and more.

In Silver, Murata subjects a snippet of footage from a vintage horror movie (Mario Bava's 1960 film 'Mask of Satan', featuring Barbara Steele) — to his exacting yet almost violent digital manipulations. The seething black and white imagery constantly decomposes and reconstitutes itself, slipping seductively between abstraction and recognition.

Rhythmically departed from Murata's usual assertive cadence, No Match employs footage from the 1980's game show, Classic Match. The seamless loop of an unyielding contestant's ineptness solidifies as an almost cruel experiment, as the stretched time limit imprisons him in a fruitless guessing game. As 1000 seconds tick off the clock, our relationship towards the disembodied head of the contender shifts from sympathetic support to uncomfortable pity. One cannot help but wonder if this humiliating effort is really worth the grand prize at stake.