Takeshi Murata

Biography

Takeshi Murata produces extraordinary digital works that refigure the experience of animation. His innovative practice and constantly evolving processes range from intricate computer-aided, hand-drawn animations to exacting manipulations of the flaws, defects and broken code in digital video technology. Whether altering appropriated footage from cinema (B movies, vintage horror films), or creating Rorschach-like fields of seething color, form and motion, Murata produces astonishing visions that redefine the boundaries between abstraction and recognition.

Murata has developed painterly techniques for processing video using glitches and errors. Conjuring digital turbulence from broken DVD encoding, he carefully tends bad video compression to generate sometimes sinuous, sometimes violent flows of digital distortion. With a powerfully sensual force that is expressed in videos, loops, installations and electronic music, Murata's synaesthetic experiments in hypnotic perception appear at once seductively organic and totally digital.

Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a B.F.A. in Film/Video/Animation. Murata has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Peres Projects, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York; Eyebeam, New York; FACT Centre, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; New York Underground Film Festival; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, Foxy Production, New York, and Deitch Projects, New York, among others.

In 2007 he had a solo exhibition, Black Box: Takeshi Murata, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Other recent solo exhibitions were held at Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia, and Ratio 3, San Francisco.

Murata lives in Saugerties, New York.