Floorboards in a gallery are torn up from the floor and propped up neatly against the wall. Then those floorboards move out of the window into the city of Berlin. The floorboards combine in various ways, lining up or crawling forward, depending on which part of the city they are in. The artist took around 2,500 pictures of floorboards arranged in various ways and made those photos into an animation.

I would like to thank the people involved in this Festival, the festival Jury, my family, relatives and friends who support me on the side, and the many people who have backed me up. It is a great pleasure to be selected as a prize winner. As I currently live and work in Berlin, Germany, I feel grateful to have an opportunity to present my work in my own country, Japan. Sustained by this award, I will work much harder to create and present my works.

A stop-motion animation film containing strange scenes of floorboards in a gallery, which tear themselves up from the floor then go out into the town. They keep moving, sometimes humorously as if they have a life of their own, and sometimes as if they are structures that make up a town. Several thousand images taken with a digital still camera are combined with painstakingly rendered scenes, carrying the audience along without a trace of boredom. Stop-motion animation is usually completed in the tiny world of the table top. In bringing it into the very heart of the city, the artist displays a stunning degree of conceptual power and audacity. Underlying this work is the expressive power of today’s digital still cameras, which compares favorably with analog cameras; the simplicity that is characteristic of digital cameras; and advances in various types of software, which make it very easy for people to create animation from integrated images. The general perception that an artist must use a video camera to record moving images is no longer valid. This is a fine work that takes full advantage of the many strengths generated by a new technology.