TSUJIKAWA Koichiro

I wonder whether visual images and media art are incompatible. Visual images are the most inconvenient media compared to any other medium. You have to appreciate them at a predetermined time and sit in the same direction as others, and the artist cannot set up a smart device that reacts to the input. The exhibition method also has to meet ordinary standards such as using a screen or monitor which are both just feeble illuminated flat surfaces. This is how I have been thinking. However, contrary to my expectations, many works were submitted both domestically and internationally and I also enjoyed the screening procedure. I could say this is because, in the production process, you cannot help being subjective about the aforementioned inconvenience of visual images and this awareness of the issue itself gives strength to works. I felt more empathy with the sensitivities applied to the comfortlessness and limitation of media than works that unconditionally celebrate the feeling of omnipotence such as the interactivity and expandability of bodies by the development of technology. The award-winning work, SEKILALA, is an aspiring work tackling the scrapping and restructuring of film technique which is the most systematic in the visual image works.