This year marks the 23rd anniversary of the Japan Media Arts Festival. Although it provided a platform for the new field of Media Arts to mature over the past quarter century, the festival has not necessarily helped consolidate the concept of Media Arts. It could be said, though, that the festival has brought into clearer focus the very nature of Media Arts, where genres remain in flux as social conditions and technology change and fluctuate. This has required the Japan Media Arts Festival organizers to remain flexible. In light of this, new awards were established this year: the Social Impact Award, the U-18 Award and the Festival Platform Award. The Grand Prize in the Art Division wasawarded to the bio-art piece [ir]reverent: Miracles on Demand. As a critique of Catholicism’s anthropocentric view of history, this fascinating piece presents a process in which microorganisms produce a blood-like fluid, resulting in the spectacle of a godless miracle performed in an incubator resembling a communion table. The Grand Prize in the Entertainment Division was awarded to Shadows as Athletes. As its title suggests, this work pairs the body movements and shadows of athletes in a number of Olympic events, reversing them so that the shadows play the main roles. This clever concept and the perfection of its visuals leave the viewer spellbound.

It has only been a year, but perhaps one year may be all it takes? Either way, I see a real and distinct difference between this year’s award winners and the works selected last year. I suppose it’s not particularly polite to attribute this difference to any “fad,” but that’s what I am going to do, anyway. For example, I’ll cite works that transform big data into something no longer seen to be popular. Aside from in the Animation Division, we haven’t seen the large number of video works this year that we did in the past. This is a year of looking for that freshest of fish, walking through the market in search of the fishmonger yelling, for instance, “Come and get it! This year’s sea bass catch is delicious!” Today, in 2020, even pieces that address AI must offer some personal perspective in order to be selected. Since Media Arts is a field that exists in the present progressive tense, this is only natural. It is also natural that the types of work submitted to the festival are changing as the tempo of the world around us accelerates. Some of these works are clever and quite cool, like the Grand Prize winner in the Entertainment Division, Shadows as Athletes, which portrays shadows as living creatures. Others, like Two Hundred and Seventy, an installation made from hundreds of rubbish bags and selected for the Excellence Award in the Art Division, or TON-TON VOICE SUMO, a piece created for senior citizens and winner of the New Face Award in the Entertainment Division, address social themes in a captivating, analogue and somewhat ironic style. It is somewhat a relief to me that irony can remain alive in the times we face today. In other entries in 2020, we see the revival of a piece like GON, THE LITTLE FOX in the Animation Division, as well as creators looking to the future and straight out asking, “What is a human being?” in Robo sapiensu zenshi (Prehistory of Robo Sapiens), the Grand Prize winner in the Manga Division. If there were ever a year to enclose the prize-winning works in a time capsule to be unearthed by those who succeed us, this would undoubtedly be that year.