EXCALIBUR is a Japanese art circle based in Tokyo and Kyoto that produces pixel art, prints, and blockchain-based works exploring video game aesthetics, Japanese myth, and history. Formed in 2006, it is composed of Yoshinori Tanaka, born in Kyoto, and Maiko Iwata, born in Tokyo. It uses Dot-e, pixel art methods once used in video game graphics, to draw landscapes rooted in ukiyo-e woodblock printmaking.
The NEW GAME+ series, begun just before the COVID-19 pandemic, reworks the video game convention of replaying a cleared game with retained status, applying that idea to life after a global reset. The METABIT series, subject of a 2024 solo exhibition in Paris, extends Nicholas Negroponte's 1990s account of a shift from atoms to bits into the 2020s, proposing a move toward what it describes as NeoAtoms as virtual and physical experience overlap. Its Ukiyo.e series renders modern Tokyo locations in Dot-e, referencing Utagawa Hiroshige's woodblock print series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Individual prints from the series have also been issued as limited-edition works in pigmented ink on silver paper.
