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When serving as a member of this Jury, there is the experience of irreplaceable joy in encountering outstanding work that excites the heart, while on the other hand, one is also faced with the difficult task of selecting the Award-winning Work. However, in this year's Art Division, as a result of careful discussion, the tough decision was reached that no entry was suitable for the Grand Prize.
Voices of suspicion might be raised at the fact that no work merited the Grand Prize despite there being more than 1,800 submissions. Nevertheless, there was little sense of the aforementioned joy in this year's reviewing process and, compared to last year, I was constantly left with a lackluster impression throughout. And I imagine this was a feeling shared by the other Jury members. The result of this was that no consensus could be reached about the winner of the Grand Prize, and this was again reflected in the awarding of five Excellence Awards.
Having been through the screening process for the second time, in my opinion the request, introduced this year, for works over ten minutes in duration to be submitted in abridged versions has led to a reduction in overall application numbers, and this may be one of the causes for a slight lack of brilliance in the entries. Nonetheless, this is not to say there were no works that stayed in my mind. Cod.Act's Nyloïd, GOSHIMA Kazuhiro's This may not be a movie, which questioned the relationship between still images and moving images/film, the video installation A Tale of Tehrangeles by Anahita RAZMI, which shows on two screens the state of affairs in Iranian communities in Tehran and Los Angeles through the motif of Charles DICKENS' novel A Tale of Two Cities, Jan CHLUP's Flat Logic-The Book which has a beautifully painterly quality, and Marc LEE's Pic-me - fly to the locations where users send posts, in which there is a sense of fear when the flood of social media use and media become tied together, were among several works of a high level of perfection that showed uniqueness, precisely utilizing the technology of new media art to clearly delineate aspects of today's society. It is my hope that works submitted next year will, in a positive way, make the selection of the Grand Prize even more difficult.
Opinions were also divided about entries submitted as video works or video installations. Whether due to the relatively shallow history of "media art", or due, within the current sphere of contemporary art, to the broad range of video works and video installations that have already been presented in museums or various other exhibition venues, there were a number of entries over an hour in duration that can be considered feature films or documentaries. How should works of this kind be dealt with in the Japan Media Arts Festival? This was also discussed in the previous year, but upon deeper consideration, surely greater tolerance is required.