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, Lampo and CATE team up to bring you Murata and Beatty in a special screening and performance. The two artists 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.

The Murata videos include: Melter 2 (2003), Cone Eater (2004), Monster Movie (2005), Untitled (Pink Dot) (2007), Untitled (Face) (2007), Timewarp Experiment (2007), Infinite Doors (2008) and Homestead Grays (2008).

Takeshi Murata (b.1974, Chicago) 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.

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 Hair Police, Eyes and Arms of Smoke, and C. Spencer Yeh’s Burning Star Core. Beatty’s collaboration with Takeshi Murata has spawned performances by Three Legged Race at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Stray Alchemists, 2007, Beijing), Deitch Projects (Heavy Light, 2008, New York), the Mattress Factory (Heavy Light, 2008, Pittsburgh, and the New Museum (No Fun: Infinite Sound and Image, 2009, New York). Each of Beatty’s performances and recordings explore the repetition and decay of simple musical themes, discovering a new world of rhythmic and harmonic possibilities with each tier of abstraction, evoking minimalist sci-fi soundtracks and clouded hypnotic landscapes. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where he runs the Mountaain label.

Beatty first appeared at Lampo in October 2008, when he premiered Falling Order I and II.

Presented in partnership with Conversations at the Edge