Shinji Murakami
2600

Shinji Murakami began the Atari series with the concept of repurposing elements from game development – gameplay screens, titles, and sprites – and adopting them into 2D and 3D artworks. Soon, he realized there were many more ways to approach this repurposing. Creating patterns using sprites (i.e. in-game icons) was one way to explore this potential further.

In his Atari series, he’s been offering gaming experiences using the latest AR technology and classic gaming experiences on console hardware from that time. Inspired by Gunpei Yokoi from Nintendo, who invented Game & Watch and Game Boy based on his philosophy of “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology” he attempted to apply this thinking by using LED panels as a material he’s been utilizing since 2016, aiming to provide another unique gaming experience. Now, after starting work on this format from early 2023, he’s managed to assemble it to a state where he can showcase it to everyone.

The twitter bird is an iconic logo, widely beloved and recognized globally. In 2023, it became suddenly obsolete. An astonishing outcome of capitalism: the unilateral decision of the world’s richest individual to replace it with an X. “In creating this piece, I infused it with hope, aspiring for this logo to continue being cherished in some way,” says Shinji Murakami.

The game “Tweety Bird/X,” inspired by the 2013 viral sensation Flappy Bird, captures the desperate struggle of Twitter, facing scrutiny from the public, as it tries to keep flying against all odds. It depicts Twitter’s overnight transformation into X and preserves the state of the company just before its entire history is wiped out.

The painting sets the two player sprites in Murakami’s Atari game, X, into a checker pattern, emulating an even lower tech gameplay. Player X’s sprite is noticeably 1.5 times larger, representing their gameplay on hard mode. This parallels a company entering a state akin to hard mode in the real world, where they face even more scrutiny and challenges without concern for societal norms or expectations.

This painting consolidates every situation arising during gameplay onto a single picture. A parallel of this act would be how Tesla accumulates various driving data onto a cloud computer, the Dojo. Like this, it enhances its Autopilot performance, utilizing simulated driving scenarios in virtual space. It then redistributes to each car through remote updates. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the accumulation of our gameplay data from Mars Lander could be utilized for real-life Mars landings?

The painting brings together five facial expressions onto a rainbow background from Murakami’s game “Emoticons.” Unlike his usual game development process, the artist designed the game’s mechanics based on the idea of what kind of artwork he wanted to create. A reversal of process. The goal was to encapsulate the ultimate combination of the most universally recognized icons: the smiley face and the rainbow, into one painting.

Murakami reversed the process of creating Emoticons: thinking first of the final artworks and then creating the game that would incorporate them. He aimed to encapsulate universality, iconicity, joyfulness, and simplicity in the artwork, symbolized by the concept of rainbows.