Works that Respond to Primordial, Instinctual Images Dreamed by Everyone

One lasting impression of this year's entries was that they are rooted in universal desires or instincts, yet sublimate these into new experiences and new creations reflecting the sensibilities of our times. I was amazed at the degree to which they earnestly addressed fundamental desires shared by everyone, not just the events or markets of last year.
While exploiting the attributes of their respective media-- the web, video, gadgetry, games, stage presentations and so on -- it was clear that these artists did not rely solely on the novelty of new technologies, but aimed for a maturity of expression. The Grand Prize winner, Perfume "Global Site Project" (MANABE Daito, MIKIKO, NAKATA Yasutaka, HORII Satoshi, KIMURA Hiroyasu), was an expansive attempt to post a vast diversity of dance videos on the Internet by providing open-source data to stimulate the ambitions of numerous creators who would further stimulate one another. Excellence Award winner THE WARPED FOREST (MIKI Shunichiro), created with his own funding by a popular commercial director, became, as a logical consequence, a freewheeling film with everything thrown into it. The other Excel lence Award recipients were Smart Trashbox (KURATA Minoru), which showed the ultimate trashcan in operation; KURATAS (KURATA Kogoro, YOSHIZAKI Wataru), a robotpiloting dream come true; and GRAVITY DAZE (TOYAMA Keiichiro and the GRAVITY DAZE TEAM), a game that manipulates gravity, fulfilling the basic humanurge to fly.
When viewing these award winners, the eye may at first be drawn to such superficialities as their cuttingedge tone or mode, but a closer look at each work reveals its solid grounding in universal dreams and desires. There, in our collective unconscious, we can see possibilities for the entertainment of the future.