13th
Award-winning WorksArt Division

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.

What caught my eye in the screening process were expressions that took embodiment or social structure as media, and works that had elements on how future media art should strike a balance with commodities. In the group of web works, I found the approach interesting in that they are not only used as a platform for sharing contents, but also offer a new environment for sharing creativity. These works have a different approach from works that incorporate material and narration, and they are difficult to evaluate even though they display a different kind of expression. These new approaches are attractive. In the screening session in the Art Division, we think positively of novelty in media presentation. However, if the works achieve a level of technology and perception in material and narration as art works, it is natural for us to accord great value to these points. On the other hand, in order not to nip the potential of expression in the bud, a new category is needed where the trend of these new media presentations can be evaluated in the future.

What I was especially aware of were: whether the work makes creative connections traversing one media we have never seen before; how we evaluate works that are unknown and even undifferentiated; and if they cannot be viewed through the prism of our existing concept of values. In the latter case, we juries have to ask ourselves questions if viewers can read the possibilities that can arouse new forms of consciousness, interpretation, or human relationship, even though the artists themselves are sometimes not aware of. In the interactive and installation genres, several trends were observed: performance types of installation that require the presence of bodies; analog nonlinear phenomena; relationships between virtual and real space; and challenging environmental or biological science by humorous criticism. All can be said to weigh heavier on the process where phenomena break out and develop by establishing a distance from pre-established harmony. In such circumstances, I focused on works that open up encounters with foreign elements or new phases by making connections with a virtual system, or connecting and sharing them with more than one system.

Media arts have not yet been determined as a specified genre of expression. Since everything that constructs culture is media, the reason why we need to call it media art is that it includes criticism of established media. The criticism includes the conventional way of using media and shows the possibilities of creating new media structures. Therefore, the use of leading-edge media and technologies is not a sufficient condition for media art. What sort of relationship and function does the expression create and how does it organize new time and space as media (beyond established media)? That is the issue. What this question means is that art is art because it one-ups current social demand (necessity), and it can be said to have public value only in this regard. Mere technological sophistication becomes rather detrimental if it is evaluated esthetically. Taking the example of reproducing natural generativeness by playing with the idea of nonlinearity and full use of algorithms, if it results in the esthetic of admiring natural changes, state-of-the-art technology is not necessary. A traditional garden is all that is needed.