A.A. MURAKAMI: JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST
This was part of an ongoing series of articles that released was digitally in May 2023. They were first published in the print edition of the Bright Moments Quarterly that was distributed at Bright Moments Tokyo in Tokyo, Japan.
A.A.Murakami is a London/Tokyo based Artist duo and are also the founders of Studio Swine. Their unique sensory installations are an ongoing series of works they call “Ephemeral Tech” where the boundaries between digital technology and natural forces are dissolved to create unnatural phenomena using real materials that engage all your senses beyond the standard visual stimuli of flat screens, projections and LED arrays. Ephemeral Tech looks to a future where technology transcends the familiar interfaces and becomes inseparable from both our built and our natural environments.
The studio is bringing their technology innovation to the Web 3 space with immersive experiences that they call ‘On Chain/ Off Screen’ and a series they call the ‘Floating World Mataverse’ which explores new interfaces for the blockchain with multisensory NFTs.
Notable projects include Infinity Blue (2018), a monumental breathing sculpture that pays homage to one of the world’s smallest but most important organisms, cyanobacteria, on permanent display at the Eden Project in Cornwall; and New Spring (2017), a tree-like structure that emits scented mist bubbles, commissioned by COS.
The artists’ work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Vitra Design Museum, Germany, and M+, Hong Kong.
A.A. Murakami created ‘Metabolic Metropolis’ for Bright Moments Tokyo, a generative art collection that depicts 100 unique views of Tokyo through which A.A.Murakami’s signature fog rings flow across the cityscape. Utilizing open source data acquired based on aerial surveys, the data set represents the real urban landscape of Tokyo as a 3D Model in the game engine Unity.
On this architectural base, custom outline shaders were developed that overlay a luminous grid of lights creating geometric patterns that glide and glitch on the surface of the city. These shaders draw inspiration from highly patterned woodblock prints of the ‘Floating World’ during the Edo period and the ‘Metabolism Architecture’ movement of 1960's Japan.
A.A.Murakami's artistic practice in merging art, technology and nature continues in the digital realm. The ethereal quality conveyed in the iconic fog rings is transferred in the web3 space capturing the fleeting moment of nature and the transience of life which lies inside the 'Metabolic Metropolis'.
