![2009 [13th] Japan Media Arts Festival Award-winning Works](/english/festival/images/h1_jusyousakuhin-en2009.gif "2009 [13th] Japan Media Arts Festival Award-winning Works")
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| © SHIMURABROS. |
Excellence Prize
SEKILALA
Visual Image
Artist : SHIMURA Yuka/SHIMURA Kentaro (SHIMURABROS.)
(Japan)
※Terms and Conditions
This is a story of a family in a setting that almost seems like to exist in one world. However, these dissociated worlds are connected by sophisticated virtual reality technologies. Feeling alienated from life and suppressing his feeling of life, the father encounters ‘bio-furniture’, pieces of living furniture equipped with system engineering. An open story developed on three screens continues to weave other new stories.
SHIMURA Yuka/SHIMURA Kentaro (SHIMURABROS.)
This is a brother and sister unit made up of Yuka & Kentaro. They graduated from the Theatre & Performance Course at Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design in London, England. Their aim is to materialize images that go beyond existing frames by inventing new imaging apparatus. They have expanded their field of activities to countries overseas, including screenings at international film festivals in Cannes and Berlin, as well as London, Paris, Prague, and Vienna.
We always know this is a prestigious award since BOHDA Katsushi, for whom we worked as assistants, and KUWAKUBO Ryota, who entered the same exhibition, have received it. We are pleased to receive the award this year. Various people visited the exhibition, which was a new experience for us. We think this is a very valuable exhibition where people can encounter media arts belonging to a extremely advanced genre.
This is an installation work that uses triple projections and shows the (dis)communication in a family through a virtual-reality space. Stories related to bio-furniture with a mouse embedded in it appear on the screens, but each time in different spatial and temporal configurations as a random combination of a fragmented sequence. Whose reality, memory, and obsession is it, and how far does it go? The viewer weaves each understanding as an existence that moves freely around different virtual spaces of time, people, and stories. The visual image, rendered brilliantly with a distinctive sense of atmosphere, looks ordinary at first glance, but perhaps, this is intentional. The contrast between the quality of the image as its content and the structure of system and space as a meta frame is vibrant, and, in this sense, it qualifies this work as being materialized in an extremely scrupulous way. The artists’ inquisitive mind and critical eye for the grammar of image and the mechanism of the image medium are constantly felt.
What makes you create a work?
For as long as we remember, we have drawn picture books together, as a sister and a brother. Without especially being ready, we began to create naturally as an extension of play. This is actually what we feel.
What tools do you use the most at present?
What do you place greatest value on in your work?
In order to convey touching feelings that images lack, we are concerned with how to use and show digital presentations. By partially using analog methods, we commit ourselves to defusing noise and a feeling of disconnection, which are unique to the digital realm.
For example, we used 16 mm analog film to shoot SEKILALA and edited it as digital data.
What personal concept runs through your creative activities?
To give entity to an image.
As a means to do this, we pursue our presentations using a new imaging machine.
Light and matter should be equal.
When you create a work, in what way do you think of a presentation using technologies or media as a means to communicate?
Means of expression produced by new technology provide options to visually present what we haven’t been able to present visually.
An image that we look at using electromagnetic waves such as X-rays or ultrasonic waves that are not part of the visible spectrum can be said to expand our eyesight itself.
Could you name a person, a work, or an event that has most influenced you?
ABE Kobo, KAFKA, Luis BUNUEL, Elmgreen & Dragset, Valentino ROSSI
What kind of work would you like to create in the future?
We are interested in new video expressions that expand our eyesight such as X-rays.
On the other hand, we are also interested in movies, which we tried to use in SEKILALA.
We think new presentations are still possible within the format of conventional movies. We would like to create a feature-length film.
What is the meaning or importance of creating for you?
It is daily life itself.
It is as important and necessary as sleep.
