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

I was just noticing something about artist's websites. It seems to me that so many artists will have a website full of their work and perhaps other interesting material until they have gallery representation. After the artist has a gallery for a while the website suddenly turns into nothing but an index page with links to the galleries website. Maybe this is incredibly obviously but I'm not sure why a website has to be nothing more than a PR tool for an artist. Take for instance my graduate school peer Justin Beal his website (at this moment) has nothing on it except for its own web address. Takeshi Murata has the same deal on his website only at least he has links to his galleries on there.

So, let's just be clear. Artist's websites are little more than sites of promotional material distribution. They are interactive business cards that unfold and contain media.

Now I know there are plenty of artist's that work with galleries that have interesting websites and they actually maintain their sites after starting their careers in the gallery world. So, I suppose what I'm interest in here is proposing that it is an announcement of "art world" "success" when an artist passes the reigns of marketing themselves to a commercial gallery that takes over that role. If you google an artist and their own personal site comes up and you click on it and it just gives you a blank page or links to galleries then you should know that that artist is commercially accomplished. They no longer have to do their own public relations work or at least they have joined a team of public relations administrators known as gallery interns.

Honestly, I'm not sure what I'm getting at here other than questioning the role of an artist's website especially now when the commercial art world has started to contract. I mean, I obviously have a website and I use it as a marketing tool. I guess I'm just thinking the marketing aspect should be the background element and the site should be an interesting place to view an artist's work even after they have a gallery. Or at least maintain it as a time capsule of pre-commercial career artwork. Whatever, I'm just eager to demonstrate my hypocrisy.

Labels: Artist's website, commercial gallery, google, Justin Beal, marketing, PR, promotional, Takeshi Murata