12th
Award-winning WorksEntertainment Division

It was a pity that, as with last year, many of the entries were confusing in appearance and empty of content, like over grown and ill maintained bonsai. One might have a great concept but nothing else, while another might be complacent in its expression, or merely rely on the latest technology, still others would just enumerate party tricks, and so on; such works cannot be called media arts. We sifted through the entries works and selected for the final screening session those that were the best; we looked for those that were challenging, beautiful, fun, surprising, expressed their contents well or were highly original. It may be a reflection of current trends that there were a number of submissions that attempted to create a new style of communication utilizing mobile phones. However, it was FONTPARK 2.0 that was awarded an Excellence Prize, exceeding the accomplishments of its rivals. It is significant that the high quality experience it provides was deemed to be the key reason for this award. This year we also received a number of business campaign advertisements; two of them were particularly excellent: driveeverydrop.com, which seeks to awaken us to environmental concerns, and its television commercial version, Drop. Although they did not win a prize, I would just like to mention that they were selected for the last screening session for both the Visual Image and Web Work categories and highly praised.

The advance of technology has allowed new media, such as web sites and video games, to increase their degree of expressiveness, and use a greater variety of visual constructs. This has resulted in a tendency for the opening animations of games and the visual images on web sites to be of an increasingly higher quality. However, despite this inclination, it was the excellence of basic visual expression, as produced by the designers and developers of commercial messages, music videos, TV programs, or animations (a genre for which the visual image has been the main subject), that stood out this year.
Thanks to having co-jurors who were website and game professionals, I was able to assess each visual image work from a fresh point of view, and found that the screening sessions became opportunities for me to consider a new value for visual art. I was personally very much inspired and I will make use of this experience in the future for my own work.

For this division, numerous works based around different media platforms were screened together as a group. To be honest, I was perplexed at first, but when the actual screening session started, the chaotic looking selection unexpectedly demonstrated a unity of direction, something that could not have emerged if they had been judged within the limited scope of existing genre divisions.
Although continuing technological improvement in modern times has wrought great changes on the entertainment industry, it seems that designers have been given a new subject, a new relationship between art and man. This year's Grand Prize winning-work, TENORI-ON, in addition to its excellence and entertainment value, was also a symbolic and innovative collaborative project; furthermore, there is great potential for new works to be born from it. I believe it to be no coincidence that all the award winning works have key factors of their own, as well as interesting modes of expression.

It was clear that this year's trend was physicality. The works that drew the most attention from the Jury were generally those that had touchable and movable features, rather than those that relied on the beauty of visual or aural expression. This phenomenon may be partly a sign of the changing times, or perhaps it is merely the reaction of human instinct and desire. While most media and expression tends towards the concept of the cyber-brain, we were fortunate to receive entries that presented a more positive expectation for the next generation. While last year many of the award winners were games, this year other media genres were better represented. The fact that the Grand Prize winner, TENORI-ON, was selected for this division was significant. Overall, it was an interesting year and suggestive of the future of the Japan Media Arts Festival.