Shinji Murakami

Shinji Murakami’s work springboards from the philosophy of Gunpei Yokoi, the famous inventor of Nintendo’s Game Boy: Withered Technology – referring to a mature technology that is cheap and well understood; and Lateral Thinking – the finding of radical new ways of using such technology. The Nou Project designs of Heart and Sparkles play with this relationship. Love is a mature emotion that is cheap and well understood; but today we must find radical new ways to access it within ourselves and share it with others. Similarly, beauty is important and I found that when working with super low resolution, the pixels create sparkles. 
While Murakami does not believe that profound human understanding has caught up to the explosive evolution of modern computer technology, he does have faith that humans are capable of love for others. The pixelated expressions of 8-bit video games at the root of his work, which are one withered part of this evolutionary process, speak to our child selves, a time when love was not so hard and we were never afraid to share it with those around us regardless of race, age, gender, background or creed. Murakami interrogates lateral thinking of this pixel, and with Heart and Sparkles, he calls upon us to do the same with love and beauty.