17 Dec, 2008
6 Winners of the 2008 Japan Media Arts Festival Entertainment Division
The Media Arts Festival Executive Committee, composed of people from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, the National Art Center and CG-ARTS Association, has announced the winners of the 12th Japan Media Arts Festival. 2,091 works from 43 countries and regions were evaluated to come up with winners in Art, Entertainment, Animation and Manga. Here are 6 worthy winners in the Entertainment Division.
Grand Prize: Tenori-on
Tenori-on is one of those gadgets that you have to experience first-hand to really appreciate. The interface of Toshio Iwai’s unique gadget is so unlike other musical instruments that one might be excused for mistaking it for a hi-tech board game and not something to make serious music with.
There are a lot of cool videos of Tenori-on on the Internet; here’s one:
Excellence Prize: Nintendo Wii Fit
“Wii Fit combines fun and fitness in one product.” Apparently, the serious people in the Media Arts Festival Executive Committee agree. Nintendo invented a new way of playing video games with its unique motion-sensing Wiimote. Things got a lot more fun with the Wii Fit (which is on my Christmas wish list, by the way). Which goes to show that gaming can be fun, healthy and award-winning at the same time.
Excellence Prize: Transform Yourself Exhibition
This is an exhibition held at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo during the summer, part of the ICC Kids Program 2008 and entitled “Kimi no Karada wo Henkan shite miyo” (literally, “Transform your Body”). The exhibition is a series of interactive media works by professors and students from Keio University and Tokyo University of the Arts that uses “devices for thinking about our dimensions” and “transform our senses of physicality”.
One work that sounds interesting is entitled “Fly! Little Me“: “Flap your arms and the little you on the wall will take flight. The sensation that you have here is passed onto the little you in the image, and you would have the strange feeling of floating.” In the video below by Design Channel TV, we can see children having fun flapping their arms as a little human figure flies up into the ceiling. Sounds interesting, even for adults.
Excellence Prize: Carbon Footprint
Eco-conscious Japan likes adverts and posters that promote awareness about the environment. Carbon Footprint, commissioned by the Discovery Channel and directed by Matt Lambert, simulates a 50-year span of time for a tin car to decompose and uses a variety of computer graphic techniques to create a seamless, realistic and memorable short film.
“It takes a second for you to recycle a can. It takes 50 years for a can to recycle itself.”
Excellence Prize: FortPark 2.0
One of the most interesting web pages I have seen for a while, FontPark 2.0 by Morisawa, a font maker, lets visitors play with fonts, twist and twirl them, stretch, transform and combine them to form entirely different figures. Or you can view what others have done (which is most likely better). Also a fun way to appreciate every stroke and curve of a kanji or kana.
Encouragement Prize: Gyorol
If you’re bored on your way to work inside a Yamanote (video link) train, you can try fishing with your keitai. Which means you have to go to this site, where fish are plentiful and relatively easy to catch. Caught fish can be named and kept in a virtual tank, where they can be observed and, I assume, fed.
Fishing has never been so easy nor so convenient. And this concept, according to the judges, can be adapted for other varied, more useful things.
Recent Comments