I've been trying to figure out Takeshi Murata's technique for pixel artifacting for quite a while now and I finally unearthed it. I'm referring to the technique used in Monster Movie, Silver, and Pink Dot. Let me first say that I am a huge fan of his work, not just the compression altering work but the mirrored abstractions and the dynamic fluid loops as well. Coneater is an amazing video.

I will occasionally google something like "Murata jitter" or "Takeshi Murata compression" and finally I came up with a series of links that lead me to the holy grail of understanding Murata's technique.

David O'Reilly? on Datamoshing

There it is, but before I embed all the videos I thought I'd give a brief description of the effect and why I think it's interesting. This will all be mac specific because I use a mac. The moment I saw Monster Movie I instantly connected it to something I had experienced on my own computer. The effect was something I had seen while playing .avi's in VLC. It was exciting to see it happen while watching an .avi file because it seemed like an accident, a glitch, the app was fucking up and it looked really interesting, kinda ugly pretty. The image basically fragments into chunky blocks underneath a still image skin of sorts. If the accident happened at the right time it would look like a figure emerging from a jagged ground with a painterly residue of the previous scene tattooed to their surface. It usually only lasted for a few seconds. Then I saw the Murata video and behold! he was controlling this accident and multiplying it. The first thing that crossed my mind was - how the hell does he do that? I want to do that.

First I thought it was something done in After Effects somehow, then I figured it must be Max/MSP/Jitter. Wrong. Then I found cosmosabravo on YouTube.



All I got from this person is that they used Quartz Composer, bad wmv compression, text edit, and VLC. I tried to get into Quartz Composer but I'm a layers person and not so into node based apps yet. Plus I couldn't find anything in QC that did anything close to what I was looking for.

Why don't I just link to one of his videos. You can see Takeshi Murata's Silver on UBU or right here:



Then I found the Datamoshing page with the embedded YT videos on how to "Datamosh". This is the single blog entry that reveals the entire process or at least a particular formula for achieving the same results as Murata.

And it seems that David O'Reilly and I had the same thought once the formula was exposed - it will soon become an easy plugin built into video editing and post production apps. It will be an iMovie filter. Is that so bad? Well, the short answer is yes. If you watch the Kanye West video Welcome to Heartbreak:



...you can already see the effect dying. It's first big primetime MTV usage and it looks like shit. It's used for nothing more than stylistic purposes. It's deteriorated into pure decoration. Murata has never used the effect without a conceptual ground. Why put the effect on a B-movie creature, a 1960's Mario Bava horror film, or Rambo? Because he is invested in deconstructing nostalgia, the accessibility of cinema history through the .avi, and the layering of visual horror/violence. There is also the perpetual (albeit very recent) artistic drive to bring the mediums of video and painting together. Go to any MFA open studios and you'll see a painter making videos or a video artist edging closer to the world of painting. Murata is one of the very few who actually make this work. The videos are simultaneously beautiful and horrifyingly violent to the body of the individual subject. These video images are so easily obtained and essentially ripped to shreds using their own internal structure. You can feel the digital guts being ripped out of the figures in Murata's videos. This so clearly reflects the genre horror in each film. There is an incredible sense of unease where we realize we are all so easy to access now and so easily manipulated if one gains access to the structure of our online lives. We can empathize with the trauma of Murata's figures through our own digital vulnerability. That pink dot that Rambo simply can not overcome is his own penetrability. Even if the only thing that penetrates Rambo is a bullet we all know he has to cauterize his wound with his own knife (Rambo: First blood Part III). And don't even get me started on the nostalgia for psychedelia.

Obviously Murata's work is layered both visually and conceptually. The Kanye West video? Not-so-much. I'm torn though. I want this effect to be democratized to an extent that anyone can use it but I don't want to see it wasted on junk ideas. So, as much as it is a thing to celebrate the final discovery of the process it is also a thing to mourn. I felt like as long as Takeshi Murata had the keys to the car he was driving us in the right direction but now the keys are available to all and they will, at best, surely drive us into a ditch and at worst, a brick wall.

Here's a video shot in the gallery of Pink Dot:



Monster Movie:

Labels: avi, compression, Datamoshing, jitter, max/msp/jitter, monster movie, pink dot, quartz composer, rambo, silver, Takeshi Murata