Monster Movie

Takeshi Murata

15 August 2005

Colour, sound. 3’ 55”

In Monster Movie, Takeshi Murata transforms a fragment of footage from a B movie (the 1981 film Caveman) into a seething, vivid morass of pure electronic abstraction. Subjected to the artist’s meticulous frame-by-frame digital reprocessing, the monster-movie footage continuously decomposes and is reconstituted, subsumed into an almost palpable digital cascade of colour, form and motion. Applying his distinctive, intricate techniques of manipulating broken encoding and bad compression to a pop cultural source, Murata creates an astonishing vision -lush, violent and painterly- from digital distortion.