Muto

I watched a video called muto the other day; it was by a famous graffiti artist and was made in 2006.

Muto has a strong craft involved in it, but the concepts are a little bit trickier to grasp.

Muto uses stop frame animation which creates a great effect of moving drawings. The images themselves were not great works of art; it would be pointless because they are constantly being wiped off.

The concepts that I grasped from watching muto was the idea of life and death and reincarnation, there was a lot of images of things being eaten and then the thing that ate it exploding and something coming out of the ruins, this to me suggested the thought of recreation, which was also what was happening physically to the images.

I also thought that the context was slightly warped, for a start, trying to depict life from black and white drawing is taken out of context, you would use colour or something to make things look a little more real, but muto doesn’t need this. Also there is a bit in the video where teeth are running like animals, it’s a stretch of the imagination but for a second you are lead to believe that they are not actually chalk doodles on a pavement but real life moving animals. Only for a second.

Muto is a refreshingly experemental video for its time and relies heavily on the craft and the physical and mental skill which has been used to make it, it is not my most favourite of videos, but I respect the artists ideas and talent.