Takeshi Murata

EAI is pleased to announce its first-ever Benefit Art Auction, to be held on Thursday, April 19. This special event will raise essential funding towards our mission of preserving and providing access to media art’s rich legacies, while fostering powerful new voices.

silent auction hosted by P·P·O·W
535 West 22nd Street, 6th floor, New York, NY

cocktail reception & screenings at EAI
535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor, New York, NY

online bidding available on Artsy

The special selection of media artworks for the public spaces of the Sagamore Hotel was drawn from EAI's extensive archive. The media artworks on display in the hotel presented formal, conceptual, or perceptual transformations of natural landscapes and environments. In works that range from the playful to the socially resonant, the artists investigate diverse notions of landscape, from transmutations of nature, the body, and everyday objects to the "media landscape" of today's televisual and digital cultures. Moving between abstraction and representation, the organic and the electronic, these works—which span five decades—also explore the materiality and meanings of video and digital media.

EAI presented a seasonally themed free screening of macabre media digging through the tropes of horror cinema. Although narrative, genre, and lurid popular entertainment may seem an unlikely source of inspiration for artists' media, the grotesque—and specifically its situation within the televisual dimension—has crept into approaches as varied as the diary video, direct-camera performance, film/video hybrid, and datamosh.

By dissecting and reanimating the themes and situations of horror film and television, artists such as Peggy Ahwesh, Michael Smith, Cynthia Maughan, Cecilia Condit, Tony Oursler, and George Kuchar offer a subversive post-mortem on the syntax and politics of the genre while offering a glimpse of the unknown, mysterious, and shocking that lurk at the video signal's outer limits.

EAI and The Sagamore Hotel in Miami Beach presented Screen Play: Moving Image Art, a special exhibition of moving image artworks for the public spaces of the hotel during Art Basel Miami Beach. Screen Play, guest curated by Lori Zippay, EAI's Executive Director, brought together video, film, and digital artworks drawn from the EAI collection across six decades. These works highlighted the cross-disciplinary relation of the moving image to other artistic media and forms—performance, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture—while also exploring the distinctive vocabularies of video, film, and digital media. The public encountered artists' moving image works in multiple public spaces of the hotel, as well as a dedicated "EAI TV Channel" for the hotel guest rooms. Screen Play featured moving image works by artists including Michael Bell-Smith, Takeshi Murata, Leslie Thornton, Jacolby Satterwhite, Joan Jonas, Merce Cunningham, Alex Hubbard, Dara Birnbaum, Shana Moulton, Lawrence Weiner, Steina, and John Baldessari.

EAI partnered with Salon 94 to present the New York City premiere of OM Rider (2013, 11:39 min), a new computer-animated video by Takeshi Murata. To celebrate this new work, which represents one of the most integral collaborations yet with composer/sound designer Robert Beatty, this special evening also spotlighted the artist's other recent creative partnerships, including Murata's video for Oneohtrix Point Never's "Problem Areas" (2013, 3:07 min) and Night Moves (2012, 6:02), made with Billy Grant. The screenings was followed by a conversation with Murata and Beatty and a live performance by Beatty and C. Spencer Yeh, who provides vocal work in OM Rider.

Uncanny Valleys was a special summer screening of new and recent video works by young artists exploring the formal, conceptual, and critical possibilities that emerge from interaction with unfaithful simulations, imperfect replication, and the slightly wrong. On a graph plotting emotional response to human likeness, the "uncanny valley" is a region of profound visceral unease elicited by simulated human features that look, move, or behave in ways that are almost, but not quite, natural. Uncanny Valleys featured videos that deploy inauthentic likenesses of human beings or deliberately skewed or bootleg versions of fictional characters, as well as inexact or differential copies of images, objects, and places. Casting a wide net with this metaphor, the videos in the screening program ask questions about how flawed proxies can be deployed for formal experimentation or social, economic, and political critique.

The program included works by artists Oliver Laric, Liz Magic Laser, Ilya Lipkin & Joen Vedel, Takeshi Murata, Rachel Rose, Georgia Sagri, Shanzhai Biennial, Pilvi Takala, and Stewart Uoo.

EAI collaborated with the Times Square Alliance to present Takeshi Murata's extraordinary digital animation in Times Square. Murata's Melter 2 (2003), an abstract experiment in hypnotic movement and color, was screened as an immersive, multi-channel installation on a monumental scale: the piece flowed across fourteen of the Square's iconic outdoor video signs simultaneously - more than 36 screens and 63,500 square feet of screen space between 42nd and 47th Streets. Every night in November, just before midnight, Murata's graphic vision filled Times Square with an exuberant, rippling landscape of digital color.

Takeshi Murata's colorful and sensuous animation offered visitors to the square three minutes of pure visual pleasure, indomitable motion and dynamism. This presentation of Melter 2 was part of Times Square Moment: A Digital Gallery, the ongoing public video project organized and presented by the Times Square Advertising Coalition (TSAC) and Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance.

EAI's 40th Anniversary Benefit included a not-to-be-missed program featuring special live performances by Joan Jonas, Shana moulton, Carolee Schneemann and Michael Smith; video pieces by artists including Charles Atles, Dara Birnbaum, Takeshi Murata, Bruce Nauman and Seth Price, among others; and music selected by Dan Graham.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) celebrated its 40th anniversary with a special project for Times Square. In partnership with the Times Square Alliance and MTV, EAI brought artists' visions to the MTV 44½ LED Screen. Marking EAI's 40 years of support for moving image art, EAI in Times Square celebrated video art's rich history of creative intervention in one of the world's most dynamic media landscapes.

From April 13 to 19, EAI highlighted the remarkable creative media interventions of artists on a spectacular scale. Works by Vito Acconci, Dan Asher, Phyllis Baldino, Dara Birnbaum, Gary Hill, Shigeko Kubota, Takeshi Murata, Nam June Paik, Martha Rosler, Stuart Sherman and William Wegman were seen daily on MTV 44½'s large-format LED screen.

For Armory Week, EAI presented a screening program at Artprojx Cinema featuring some of the newest additions to its extensive collection of artists' video. The hour-long program featured works newly added to the EAI archive by a multi-generational group of artists including Jaime Davidovich, Andrew Lampert, Kristin Lucas, Cynthia Maughan, Takeshi Murata and Martha Rosler.

Artprojx Cinema, a new collaborative venture with The Armory Show and VOLTA NY, presented a screening program of over 80 artists' films and videos from over 40 galleries participating at the fairs and leading international public arts organizations and curators.

EAI participated in The NY Art Book Fair 2009, organized by Printed Matter at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. EAI's project space, installed in P.S.1's basement vault, presented FREE TRADE, a program of videos exploring economies of exchange in a globalized world: the circulation of art, ideas, information and capital. On view were new and historical works, drawn from EAI's extensive collection, by artists including Chris Burden, Bernadette Corporation, Martha Rosler, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Dara Birnbaum, Kalup Linzy, Seth Price, Lawrence Weiner, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Ken Jacobs, Gordon Matta-Clark, Muntadas, Takeshi Murata, Leslie Thornton and Ryan Trecartin.

In his first artist talk in New York City, Takeshi Murata screened and spoke about his recent and rarely seen video works, including works in progress. Joining in a conversation with Josh Kline of EAI, Murata shared insights into his innovative practice and continually evolving process, which ranges from intricate computer-aided, hand-drawn animations to exacting manipulations of the flaws, defects and broken code in digital video technology.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to participate in The 2008 New York Art Book Fair. EAI will present a special program of videos that considers issues of access, circulation and obsolescence. The program explores "out of print" art and media, in the form of limited edition videos, site-specific installations, Internet searches, one-off broadcasts, and ephemeral actions and performances that exist only as documents or artifacts.

The re-edit and the remix have become increasingly important strategies for artists working with appropriated moving images. In the era of YouTube and affordable, user-friendly video editing software, a minimalist approach to reworking appropriated material has emerged. What is the most economical way to make something new from something old?

Eschewing collage, the artists in this program choose to make works by refashioning a single piece of found video or film, such as a Hollywood action movie, a '70s sitcom, or a low-resolution video clip. Though recalling Internet fan edits and exercises encountered in film school editing classes, these remixes and re-edits by artists are driven by conceptual or formal investigations. Employing an economy of means, these artists create new forms of cultural critique and media intervention.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presented a series of video programs at The Park Avenue Armory during the 20th annual Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). EAI invited the first year graduate students in the CCS program to curate video programs out of the EAI collection. Four separate programs were produced by the students, which were exhibited on monitors in the Armory's main Hallway between February 21-25, 2008.

EAI partnered with Y-3 to present a program of video works from the EAI collection on the exterior of Y-3's newly opened location in Miami's Design District. Inside the Y-3 store, in its second level event space, an indoor video program featuring the influential and provocative video works of Dara Birnbaum was on view.

Contemporary music drives the visuals of these recent and historical videos. Pop, heavy metal, experimental, house, hip-hop, and ambient sounds mix in this series of performance, found-footage, abstract, and animated videos. Videophonic includes works by Steina Vasulka, Gusztav Hámos, Cory Arcangel, Forcefield, Takeshi Murata, and Paper Rad.

EAI collaborated with the NADA Art fair to present a screening of videos by artists involving intervention, intrusion, and trespassing. Documenting literal, formal, or conceptual acts of breaking and entering, their works harness disruption and surprise. Artists in the program included Bernadette Corporation, Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, Dan Graham, Klara Liden, Rachel Mason, Takeshi Murata, Michael Smith, and Ryan Trecartin.

EAI collaborated with artist collective Paper Rad on a new site-specific project for The Armory Show 2006. Paper Rad transformed EAI's booth at the fair into an immersive installation featuring their vibrant illustrations, constructions, and multimedia works. EAI also featured new works by artists including Bernadette Corporation, Dan Graham, Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata, Seth Price, Steina, and Lawrence Weiner, among others.

EAI presented nightly screenings of new video from the EAI collection by emerging and established artists. Works by Cory Arcangel, Bernadette Corporation, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata, Paper Rad, Seth Price, and Lawrence Weiner were shown.

EAI participated in LOOP :THE VIDEO ART FAIR '05, featuring works by artists including Cory Arcangel, Bernadette Corporation, Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata, Paper Rad, and Radical Software Group (RSG). EAI also took part in the discussion: Best Practices for the Trade of Video Art. This panel examined key issues relating to the presentation, sale, and preservation of video art, and highlighted best practices.

EAI curated the second manifestation of Smack Mellon's multi-screen video exhibition. MULTIPLEX 2 featured new and classic video works from the EAI collection, and was the inaugural exhibition of Smack Mellon's new gallery space.

EAI held a launch and screening for its new initiative, EAI Projects, featuring recent video by emerging artists, including Bernadette Corporation, Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata and Seth Price.

Electronic Arts Intermix was a participant in The Armory Show: The International Fair of New Art 2005. EAI featured new video and digital works by emerging and established contemporary artists, including Cory Arcangel, JODI, Paper Rad, and Lawrence Weiner. EAI also previewed a new initiative featuring emerging artists, including Bernadette Corporation, Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata, and Seth Price.