Four video works by Macoto Murayama in collaboration with Dawn Before Silence, Doyeq, Echoton, Lenta as well as digital images and large video installation by Macoto Murayama will be presented at the show “New works by Macoto Murayama” at Metal in Liverpool, Edge Hill Railwa Station. The exhibition is a special project during Liverpool Biennial 2014 and is supported by The Japan Foundation, Arts Council England, Liverpool City Council.
The Berlin-based label Abandoned Audio, a newly established sub-label of 31337 Records, and Frantic Gallery from Tokyo join forces for „METAMACHINE“, presenting a series of audio/visual works and their research into the collaborative possibilities between electronic music and contemporary art. International musicians who work with a vast range of techniques from analogue field recording to drone effects meet Japanese artists active in the field of oil painting and digital art to collaborate on 6 video works which will be presented online as well as showcased during year 2014 in art exhibitions taking place in Singapore, Liverpool and Tokyo.
The aim and starting point of this project derives from the urge to understand the possibilities of collaboration between fine art and (contemporary / electronic) music. The idea behind METAMACHINE is not only to create audio/visual pieces, but also to research the possibilities of synthesizing sound and images influenced by two different artistic fields and cultures.
What exactly is METAMACHINE? The metaphor comes from the artistic path of Atsushi Koyama, one of the participating artists. While stressing the aesthetic qualities of the machine and mechanical drawings in the media of oil painting, Koyama merges the human body with mechanisms, creating a man-machine (similar to the notorious “Tetsuo”, but in a more sublimated way). As if to incorporate the beauty of the human body, Koyama’s mechanisms break away from their earthly nature. They take us to another reality, beyond utilitarian usage or function itself, beyond daily life and the utility of a gadget. Koyama’s machines act more like “mechanical” (“mecha-aesthetical”) keys to another dimension, existing outside physical reality and its laws.
At the same time, Macoto Murayama combines his knowledge of architecture, computer graphics and botany to reveal the mechanical structures of organic forms. In his Digital Gardens of Inorganic Flora, the sexual organs of a plant, which have been an object of admiration across all cultures and epochs, are presented as a Machine! His images are like “blueprints of God”, seemingly stolen from the sketches that Mother Nature uses to create the organic beauty of a flower. Ultimately, Murayama’s “metamachines” provide us with an imaginary link to something beyond organic substance or mechanical structure.
The concept of METAMACHINEs extends and embraces electronic music as well. This genre originally emerged out of the relationship between human beings and machines, where the machine acts as a valid and independent participant to a certain degree. The result of this “posthuman entity”, the techno-sound, is — as in the case of the aforementioned visual artists — the key to the frontiers beyond the dimension where musician and machine are present as material objects. This unit itself is METAMACHINE, serving as a portal towards an immaterial field of fantasy. At this point, all of the artists come together in their intentions, and here is where METAMACHINE is activated...
*image (left)
© Macoto Murayama and Dawn Before Silence
courtesy of the artist and Frantic Gallery
