14th
Award-winning WorksArt Division

What I felt in participating in this screening was the sense of "time." It may be similar to the confusion felt when standing silently in front of several hundred different sized cans. Humans are given a limited amount of time to live. We are like strings of set lengths. Today, in the information space, works are proliferating by massive numbers, creating massive accumulations at a speed that conflicts with our individually allotted amounts of time. Hundreds of thousands of songs and thousands of images. Thinking about the length of one's string, which has far surpassed one's tangible limits, leaves us with a sense of emptiness. In the case of still images, rationality that leads moving expression and massive amounts of information to instantaneous understanding serves to support the quality of expression. How should the concept of time be recognized in works that require "time?" The shortsighted problem of needing to simply shorten the amount of time is obvious, but what sensations should be made to work there? This is the question that has been generated.

The concept of media as contained in media art continually changes in meaning as a symbol with time. The meaning of media acquired from robots, for example, emphasizes the phenomenon of media as a pre-contemporary term by drawing on the analogy of cutting-edge, new technology and future outlook seen from the viewpoint of the past and the approaching appearance of robots by humans. Meanwhile, robotics, which was created by the sacred environment that we live in, will continue to spread in use via revolutionary technologies created by man as environmental robots and as social agents that mold our society. Even if have applied the evaluation of robotics to the evaluations of social function derived from functional and structural beauty in the past, I sense that this will be connected to art in the future. While the former kinetic art works are expanded on as information technologies, I personally learned through this screening that works that leave one feeling the sense of art in a completed exterior or a unexpected mixture do indeed deserve such recognition.

Today, I believe that the most important question being asked in the field of art is regarding the correlation between the global and the local. The answer to that question sometimes manifests itself in the form of Cool Japan or otaku, borderless Internet companies, and as value in the art market. However, for this screening, I sensed that mainly the impact made by the installations was too grand to be captured in such a framework. As the existing areas of contemporary art face major bottlenecks, the techno art model continues to shift into position as the key art model of our era. However, that is not an evaluation of the innovation of machines and systems. Nor is it because humans have mastered such machinery and systems and expanded sensation and perception.
Art is a value-transforming mechanism and it is on the verge of being reformed.This is a conversion-type art model that goes beyond the placement or participation models. The key lies in how existing museums and galleries incorporate that as art. I hope that visitors will experience this anticipation at the exhibit.

The categories for entries to the Japan Media Arts Festival might have been a tentative decision. It may reflect the fact that the term "Media Art" itself is a transient term.
In other words, two ways of categorization exist without confirming logical consistency.
One is the categorization by the technology used to create the work, and the other is categorization by content. As a result, some categories lose their validity.The Website genre, for instance, in terms of the Internet, the spread of smart phones and other technologies has forced the demise of tradition where people viewed the Internet from a single desktop. Clearly, the problem that technological development creates is not the technology itself, but the power of a format where content genres are roped off and categorized. For example, still life painting and landscape painting are different genres even though they use the same painting techniques and each necessitated a disparate process of cultural orchestration in order to be realized.
The digital photograph genre does not exist anymore. We need to focus on the history of photography-no, perhaps it is the history of "images" that begs focus.

The Art Division usually receives many entries from overseas, and this year it reached an unprecedented level, making up for 43 percent of the total. On the whole, we encountered many works in the movie, digital photograph, graphics still image, and website genres that bring the sense of déjà vu.. On the other hand, in the interactive art and installation genres, a new trend was seen in the works that reflect the technologies becoming an everyday affair and the resulting changes in society. I believe this is because in the two genres (interactive art and installation), the media and methods of expression are not limited but rather the linkage of multiple media and domains are acceptable. In other words, I was able to confirm anew that the way of expression of art is not limited to existing technologies, aesthetics or methods of expression but becoming more diverse, and that in itself is an essential characteristic of Media Arts.
The jury largely agreed on Award Winners, which means that there was a clear difference between Award-Winning level and other works. The jury's opinions were split over the Grand Prize, with some voting for The EyeWriter. There were largely two tendencies of Award-Winning Works. One is work with high-quality finish and a strong spatial and perceptual impact, which is not a mere spectacle but has somewhat detached perspectives. The other is work that draws away from the identity of the artist and expands from an everyday project into a public one, incorporating concepts such as information sharing and DIY. Both of these types of works have a commonality in that they both encourage the participation of the audience.
Finally, my overall impression was that the trend of art is shifting to a more mature direction in which an emphasis is placed on how to rediscover and put together new and old technologies rather than the advanced development of technologies, and that art is beginning to play a role in defamiliarizing the relationship between society and people to build a new relationship with more creativity.