23rd
Award-winning WorksArt Division

Last year three of the jury members in the Art Divi- sion were new, which changed the direction of the Art Division within media arts. Previously, we evaluated a diverse field of expression including kinetic art, film, animation and contemporary art--in a wide range of different fields all grouped together, while consider- ing each genre-specific feature. However, this year we shifted direction to clarify our policy of judging informa- tion design and media art as the core of the Art Division. This can be seen as a shift from diversity in a catch-all group to identifying diversity with a narrow focus on media art.Japanese artists won the Grand Prize and the Excel- lent Awards, and the themes presented encompassed extremely contemporary scientific motifs such as AI, A- LIFE, bio art, robotics and multiple dimensions. These works were created with intricate systems, unique pro- cesses and concepts. In some respects these artists are already recognized, but their works far surpassed that of other candidates. This kind of meticulous art- istry is beginning to be seen as a particularly Japanese characteristic. This art also demonstrates that works steeped in subculture design are not Japan's only ex- ports. These artists do not just stand on their own, but represent a diverse pool of talented people who play important roles in group work in other productions and corporate projects. This combination of multifaceted professionalism among mid-career artists has aug- mented the substance of their work.Andrey CHUGUNOV's Total Tolstoy, which won the New Face Award, took apart Tolstoy's text as the most apt sample of an outdated humanistic topic in the contemporary smartphone culture, and created an audiovisual representation of it with an information sci- ence approach. This was an intriguing example of how this kind of social criticism approach can be effective as the main strategy in media art.

Collaborations with science give shape to visions of as-yet-unseen forms of life based on insight into ecosystems, inclusive of technology. They also deliver a definitive blow to the heart of those who look on while still not knowing what it is they see. Such an encounter is just what I have eagerly anticipated in taking part in the Japan Media Arts Festival jury, as I have described in my previous jury critique. As for the actual playing out of that process, the experience will start with a first encounter that may elicit, "Just what is this?" while the observer displays either surprise, shock, fear, discomfort, or even a faint smile, for example. Next comes the stage of coming to find out what sort of ecosystem the work was borne of, as well as what kind of insight into ecosystems informed the work. Accordingly, this means that what is important, first and foremost, is that the work elicits some sensation that makes the viewer ask, "Just what is this?" This, of course, does not mean something merely sensational; I could be satisfied with work prompting a gradual reaction along the lines of "Oh?" as well. My thoughts in this vein are borne of an extremely orthodox and altogether dry, prosaic view of art: that, most importantly, art signifies the creation of something new; and furthermore that it ought to be a type of work for which the transformations it entails are, first of all, to be received with wholesale physicality, involving no detachment from life, thought, senses, and so on. Moreover, when in the midst of an encounter along these lines, I would expect to be led away from the narrow, limited framework of the experience of being myself, and then guided to a state of being where any distinction between me and you, or somebody else breaks down. Here, too, I find myself dependent on this hackneyed, passé sort of conviction. To expand a bit further, this is based on an additional conviction I have: that it is the new forms of science and technology, the very systems that appear to be farthest removed from this sort of conviction that really grapple with it in earnest. In the current year's jury as well, I was afforded opportunities to encounter works offering a sense of these possibilities that are inherent to art. Once again, I would like to express my gratitude.

In the Japan Media Arts Festival, the award-oriented appraisal of submitted work is primary, while the yearto-year establishment of themes and festival planning is less central. With the exception of reflecting trends in the tide of submitted works, then, determining specific attributes characterizing the body of work is a difficult task. Nonetheless, within that context over the course of my three years on the jury panel I have been of the position, regarding the Art Division, that emphasizing the exhibitory nature of awarded works reinforces the distinct singularity of which media art is possessed. The Art Division saw somewhat of a decrease in the number of entries submitted, in comparison with the previous year. I believe that the primary cause of this was a drop in the number of video works based on cinema-esque storytelling. Due to trends in the works that gained high praise in the previous year, it appears that the number of entries of video works in this genre has declined. Nevertheless, growth has meanwhile been seen in each of a diverse range of specialized fields, from media installations and sound art to bio art and AIrelated work. This suggests that a growing appreciation of information art, or information design, incorporating future-tense forms of new technologies and scientific approaches--critically as well as out of necessity--is coming to form the central axis of submitted works. Given that at the global level the overall concept of "media art" is not universal in nature, in the view of the Art Division, the fact that a clear set of attributes has at last come to take definable shape for us seems a beneficial development. For in the broad but somewhat flat existing field of art, with its repetition of covers and patchwork approaches, one cannot expect to find evidence of any emerging nature or distinct singularity lying ahead. The significance of media art lies not only in an establishment and scrutiny of the genre, but also in its function of mining new veins in as-yet-contextualized fields of art with technology- and science-based crossovers, or of upending and overhauling established historical tenets. The addition of the Social Impact Award to the usual yearly roster for this current festival may be foreseen to have a reinforcing effect on the trend toward finding points of commonality between technology and art among entries submitted in years to come, from a prospective based on social design. Considering the nature of the changes that have taken place in the Art Division jury, as I have touched on above, my impression of the entries submitted in the current year was minimal. Although a certain diversity has taken root within the specialized field of media art, new works carrying some element of surprise by adopting either a new vision or a scientific approach transcendent of what might be anticipated, for example, was nominal. While the consumerization of technology has facilitated media art's development, the sharing and propagation of any technological environments that offer ease of access to students and other individuals has become relatively simplified. It is undeniable that the salient impact of work borne exclusively of a unique vision or experimental approach will therefore diminish while more or less analogous work comes to proliferate. In this environment, the Grand Prize-winning [ir]reverent: Miracles on Demand makes an attempt to view bio art from a higher perspective rather than from the historical context, thus rendering more tangible the contradictions and issues that arise from its decoding of Christian customs and symbolism from a perspective grounded in bio art. This is the first time a work of bio art has been awarded the Grand Prize. The work emerges from years of research leading up to its realization and method of expression, in the form of a bioweapon-esque portable package that lends the piece a cynical and critical edge. More than narrative elements, the top-rated video works exhibited a tendency to pursue 3D expression in the high-resolution format that will likely become commonplace in the coming 5G era. Beyond this, one could perhaps intuit indications of a systemic progression that is distinct from the conventional sensory environment in the works as well. Its unique infrastructure is paired with original content, such as in work predicated on projection in a special dome theatre, for instance. The Social Impact Award-winning SOMEONE, a networking-based piece, places viewers as actual flesh-and-blood actors in roles replacing the functions and setup of AI service centers, as has been implemented in e-commerce. In doing so, the work evokes realities that have fallen into blindspots and in the characteristic nature of the "world of things" that exists in IoT (the Internet of Things), exhibiting considerable capacity to provide critical commentary. In this piece, the people-as-viewers find themselves unable to take peaceful, undisturbed refuge in transparent positions of transcendence as well. Among the Excellence Award-winning works, Soundform No.1, which has its roots in a forgotten scientific discovery of the 19th century, constitutes simple, physical sound art informed by a somewhat retro bent. Predicated on the fine-grained degree of resolution characterizing an approach informed by Big Data processing, distinct from conventional sound art, sound sculpture and the like, the work comes to feedback on itself. Its discoveries of the real, physical world are of a complexity and collectivity conceived at the core axis of the work. The design of the hard device-based installation, coupled with the work's minimal level of control, serves to break the overly software-oriented tendencies exhibited by digital art and inject the work with a contemporary sensory quality and freshness, as it played out for me.

In the Guidelines for the Teaching of High School Education, Japanese language classes have been separated into "Japanese Language (Logic)" and "Japanese Language (Literature)." The Aichi Triennale's state-sponsored grant was taken away after it opened. Graffiti by possible Banksy was torn off a wall and is now exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building. This is the kind of era we are living in. I began my service on the jury under these circumstances, but I felt that the artists' submitted works resuscitated me in a way, because they were entered merely from a basic, genuine desire to be seen or heard. Unfortunately, my experience was that very few pieces really moved me. Many seemed to be rehashing what I'd already seen elsewhere, or extensions of what we've viewed before. Some jury members lamented that the works were lacking in any strong message. I feel, however, that this missing purpose can be recognized as the very message of our current times. Issues and views that exceed human perception, that are so complicated that they cannot be explained in a few words, that are made up of data so detailed they allow little space for human analysis--all of these can be seen to symbolize the issue of human exclusion in contemporary times. What appears to be so massive that it defies summary is fitting to reflect a "post-human" world. There were a few works this year that embody this notion. Two Hundred and Seventy, a piece in which 270 rubbish bags slowly expand and contract was memorable in this regard. Art, by nature, goes beyond existing convention, and dislikes being confined within boundaries. It concerns having to carry within one's gut something that cannot be controlled. This plight will remain unchanged, and it allows no exception for media art. But within it we can find so much: life, beauty and literature, or even death and lies. At the time when this Japan Media Arts Festival was collecting art submissions, Pierre HUYGHE was exhibiting work addressing the unsettling and incalculable nature of life at the Okayama Art Summit. There, one was able to witness contemporary themes echoing concepts like internal observation and autopoiesis. I am left wondering if we will be able to see such developing features in media art next year.

The events surrounding the Aichi Triennale and its spill-overs at the 'Japan Unlimited' exhibition in Vienna commemorating the 150-year anniversary of the diplomatic relations between Japan and Austria, created a difficult position, not only for the Japanese Media Art Community, but even more so for artists and culture workers with connections with the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. My initial reasons for accepting the offer to become a Jury Member were to participate in the public debate about Media Art, to support, encourage and empower young artists. And because of these reasons, I did chose to continue my work for the Japan Media Arts Festival. I believe, that my position as an practicing artist enables me to have slightly different views on the artworks: I can retrace the steps the artists took to arrive at their final artworks, I do believe this gives me more more insights into the thinking processes of the genesis of artworks, but nevertheless it can be an interesting to be asked to judge your fellow artists: sometimes one is excited, sometimes underwhelmed, and sometimes it takes time, reflection and discussion with other jury members to understand what makes a work special. The selected artworks can only be a reflection of the interests and viewpoints of the jury. Some artworks resonate more with a specific jury member, some artworks resonate with more that one jury member, and very rarely an artwork resonates with the whole jury. Comparing works is still a challenging process, because of the width, breadth and depth of the Art Category. For this year, we used the following criteria in our assessment of submitted works: their artistic concept, the technical execution, and the overall contemporary theme that the work represents. The difficulty and challenge for artists is to create works that is not only new, well-executed and relevant, but also highly balanced. I believe we found that balance this year, and I am particularly excited that one artwork using biological processes that have been interpreted as miracles was chosen for the grand prize. With this decision, I do hope we can expand and redefine the notion of what is perceived as Media Art, and show that non-traditional, alchemic methods in Media Art production are not only welcome, but strongly encouraged.

After the three years I spent on the Art Division selection committee for the Japan Media Arts Festival, some four years have gone by and for the first time I have now been given the chance to be involved with the Art Division jury. If one posits that a major shift has taken place over these five years, it would be in reference to the move to do away with categorization within the criteria for jury selection while the classification of actual formats of work remains. My sense is that this has enabled a comprehensive analysis of the works as well as deeper discussions aimed at issues involving the works' imagery. While the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI), bio art, 3D modelling and so on, no longer seems so novel and fresh as it once did, jurying has come to focus on work exhibiting a high degree of maturity with regard to the artist's approach to realizing the work's presentation or its proposal of issues to be addressed. In that sense, the Social Impact Award-winning work SOMEONE, by US artist Lauren Lee McCarthy, exhibited considerable capacity for critical social commentary. The manner in which the work presented relationships between people and modern technology, in artistic form, gave viewers a simulated experience of modern people's daily life while laying bare the reality of the relationships that exist among modern people themselves. At the same time, however, the format of expression in SOMEONE, predicated on the use of existing media and technology, has now become mainstream in so much art production. For this reason, I got the impression that the intensity of the piece was diminished to some extent. On one hand, I got a real sense that the current posture on the acceptance of media is changing as an outcome of the generation designated as digital natives, for whom modern technology has become physicalized. On the other hand, I found that among the entries submitted, encounters with impenetrable, enigmatic works were generally few and far between. In these circumstances, the Grand Prize-winning [ir]reverent: Miracles on Demand by US artist Adam W. BROWN was a standout work for its use of bio media to pose implicit questions on art from under an overarching theme of Christianity, thus intimating the notion of "media" in a broader sense.

In the Japan Media Arts Festival, the award-oriented appraisal of submitted work is primary, while the yearto-year establishment of themes and festival planning is less central. With the exception of reflecting trends in the tide of submitted works, then, determining specific attributes characterizing the body of work is a difficult task. Nonetheless, within that context over the course of my three years on the jury panel I have been of the position, regarding the Art Division, that emphasizing the exhibitory nature of awarded works reinforces the distinct singularity of which media art is possessed. The Art Division saw somewhat of a decrease in the number of entries submitted, in comparison with the previous year. I believe that the primary cause of this was a drop in the number of video works based on cinema-esque storytelling. Due to trends in the works that gained high praise in the previous year, it appears that the number of entries of video works in this genre has declined. Nevertheless, growth has meanwhile been seen in each of a diverse range of specialized fields, from media installations and sound art to bio art and AIrelated work. This suggests that a growing appreciation of information art, or information design, incorporating future-tense forms of new technologies and scientific approaches--critically as well as out of necessity--is coming to form the central axis of submitted works. Given that at the global level the overall concept of "media art" is not universal in nature, in the view of the Art Division, the fact that a clear set of attributes has at last come to take definable shape for us seems a beneficial development. For in the broad but somewhat flat existing field of art, with its repetition of covers and patchwork approaches, one cannot expect to find evidence of any emerging nature or distinct singularity lying ahead. The significance of media art lies not only in an establishment and scrutiny of the genre, but also in its function of mining new veins in as-yet-contextualized fields of art with technology- and science-based crossovers, or of upending and overhauling established historical tenets. The addition of the Social Impact Award to the usual yearly roster for this current festival may be foreseen to have a reinforcing effect on the trend toward finding points of commonality between technology and art among entries submitted in years to come, from a prospective based on social design. Considering the nature of the changes that have taken place in the Art Division jury, as I have touched on above, my impression of the entries submitted in the current year was minimal. Although a certain diversity has taken root within the specialized field of media art, new works carrying some element of surprise by adopting either a new vision or a scientific approach transcendent of what might be anticipated, for example, was nominal. While the consumerization of technology has facilitated media art's development, the sharing and propagation of any technological environments that offer ease of access to students and other individuals has become relatively simplified. It is undeniable that the salient impact of work borne exclusively of a unique vision or experimental approach will therefore diminish while more or less analogous work comes to proliferate. In this environment, the Grand Prize-winning [ir]reverent: Miracles on Demand makes an attempt to view bio art from a higher perspective rather than from the historical context, thus rendering more tangible the contradictions and issues that arise from its decoding of Christian customs and symbolism from a perspective grounded in bio art. This is the first time a work of bio art has been awarded the Grand Prize. The work emerges from years of research leading up to its realization and method of expression, in the form of a bioweapon-esque portable package that lends the piece a cynical and critical edge. More than narrative elements, the top-rated video works exhibited a tendency to pursue 3D expression in the high-resolution format that will likely become commonplace in the coming 5G era. Beyond this, one could perhaps intuit indications of a systemic progression that is distinct from the conventional sensory environment in the works as well. Its unique infrastructure is paired with original content, such as in work predicated on projection in a special dome theatre, for instance. The Social Impact Award-winning SOMEONE, a networking-based piece, places viewers as actual flesh-and-blood actors in roles replacing the functions and setup of AI service centers, as has been implemented in e-commerce. In doing so, the work evokes realities that have fallen into blindspots and in the characteristic nature of the "world of things" that exists in IoT (the Internet of Things), exhibiting considerable capacity to provide critical commentary. In this piece, the people-as-viewers find themselves unable to take peaceful, undisturbed refuge in transparent positions of transcendence as well. Among the Excellence Award-winning works, Soundform No.1, which has its roots in a forgotten scientific discovery of the 19th century, constitutes simple, physical sound art informed by a somewhat retro bent. Predicated on the fine-grained degree of resolution characterizing an approach informed by Big Data processing, distinct from conventional sound art, sound sculpture and the like, the work comes to feedback on itself. Its discoveries of the real, physical world are of a complexity and collectivity conceived at the core axis of the work. The design of the hard device-based installation, coupled with the work's minimal level of control, serves to break the overly software-oriented tendencies exhibited by digital art and inject the work with a contemporary sensory quality and freshness, as it played out for me.