Bad At Sports

This week: San Francisco checks in with a great interview. Bad at Sports contributors Brian Andrews and Patricia Maloney sat down with artist Takeshi Murata and sound designer Robert Beatty on November 9, 2013, at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, to discuss Murata’s most recent digitally animated video, OM Rider (2013). OM Rider follows two animated creatures: a wizened old man that Andrews describes as “half the Curious George Man in the Yellow Suit, half like the butler from Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and a hipster wolf, which rides a moped through a barren landscape and performs other aimless tasks. The video begins with the creature playing a synthesizer that gives the video its title. Om Rider contains Murata’s characteristic absurd humor and aesthetic, which mixes highly attuned lighting and composition with more retro modeling and minimalist, almost antiseptic spaces. Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago. In 1997, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied film, video, an