VIDEO & SOUND FROM TAKESHI MURATA & ROBERT BEATTY
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 1, 2010
Thursday, March 3, 2010 at 6pm | Takeshi Murata and Robert Beatty in person!
- Still from “Melter 2” (Takeshi Murata, 2003). Courtesy the artist.
For the last six years, artist Takeshi Murata and musician Robert Beatty (Hair Police, Three Legged Race) have collaborated on a series of visceral glitch-based animations, setting Murata’s psychedelic imagery to Beatty’s hypnotic compositions. Murata’s videos range from hand-drawn animations of fluidly morphing shapes to painterly abstractions of meticulously hijacked digital code. Beatty employs hacked electronics and thrift store cast-offs to craft otherworldly sonic narratives. Together, the duo’s electronic alchemy transforms the detritus of consumer culture into dazzling tapestries of sound and color. This evening, CATE teams up with experimental music and intermedia series Lampo to bring you Murata and Beatty in a special screening and performance. The two will present their work in three sets: a solo performance by Beatty, a screening of videos by Murata, and a new audio-visual performance, created especially for this program, by both. Visit www.lampo.org. Takeshi Murata and Robert Beatty, 2003-10, USA, multiple formats, ca. 90 min.
TAKESHI MURATA (b.1974, Chicago, IL) graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a BFA in Film/Video/Animation. In 2007, Murata was the subject of a solo exhibition, Black Box: Takeshi Murata, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. His work has been included in solo and group shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; 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; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; New York Underground Film Festival; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Foxy Production, New York, and Deitch Projects, New York, among others.
ROBERT BEATTY (b.1981, Lexington, KY) is an artist and electronic musician who performs solo under the name Three Legged Race. He is a long-running member of the bands Hair Police, Eyes and Arms of Smoke, and C. Spencer Yeh’s Burning Star Core. Through Beatty’s collaboration with Takeshi Murata, Three Legged Race has performed at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; Deitch Projects, New York; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh), and the New Museum, New York. Beatty’s performances and recordings explore the repetition and decay of simple musical themes. With each tier of abstraction, they discover a new world of rhythmic and harmonic possibilities while also evoking minimalist sci-fi soundtracks and clouded hypnotic landscapes. He lives in Lexington, where he runs the Mountaain record label.
About
Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
