SFC Students from Nao Tokui Lab Win Awards at the Asia Digital Art Award FUKUOKA and the Yamanashi Media Arts Award 2021

February 4, 2022

Works by SFC students from the Nao Tokui Lab, led by Associate Professor Nao Tokui of the Graduate School of Media and Governance, have won awards at the Asia Digital Art Award FUKUOKA .

The Asia Digital Art Award FUKUOKA is a public exhibition organized by the 2021 Asia Digital Art Award Executive Committee, which includes Kyushu University and Fukuoka Prefecture. It was launched in 2001 as a platform to discover and nurture creators from northern Kyushu with the advanced skills and rich sensibilities to lead the creation of digital content. The exhibition aims to fuse logical thinking and artistic sensibility against a backdrop of advanced media technology, and it is a competition for world-class media art works deeply rooted in Asian culture and climate.

Seiya Aoki (3rd-year doctoral student, Graduate School of Media and Governance; artist name: Scott Allen), Keito Takaishi (1st-year master's student, Graduate School of Media and Governance), Asuka Ishii (2nd-year student, Faculty of Policy Management), Kazufumi Shibuya (2nd-year student, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies), Bokukan Ri (3rd-year student, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies), Atsuya Kobayashi (1st-year master's student, Graduate School of Media and Governance), Nao Tokui (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Media and Governance)

We are greatly honored to receive this award.

Kanji characters are classified into six categories (rikusho) based on their origins. In our increasingly complex and diverse modern world, is it possible to explain everything simply by "using" kanji created through traditional methods? This work is an installation that invites visitors to take on the role of "creating" kanji by inputting any text, which is then processed by an image generation model. Through this experience, we hope you will contemplate the potential for creating kanji for all sorts of concepts.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Tokui for his guidance on this project, to the members of the Nao Tokui Lab's x-visual team who worked with me, and to everyone else who provided support. (Seiya Aoki)

The work "Compressed ideograph-visualized" also won the Y-SILVER (Excellence Award) at the Yamanashi Media Arts Award 2021 .

The Yamanashi Media Arts Award 2021 is a public exhibition organized by Yamanashi Prefecture to realize a rich local community through the promotion of culture and arts. It was held with the overarching theme of "Living," overcoming the ongoing global pandemic, with the aim of nurturing and discovering artists and creators with high expressive power, imagination, or advanced digital technology skills.

Kanna Momose (4th-year student, Faculty of Policy Management), Ryo Saimon (1st-year master's student, Graduate School of Media and Governance)

I am honored to receive such a prestigious award. This time, we created a work on the theme of religion and AI, questioning the nature of gods in the modern age. Through this piece, I hope that viewers will feel free to speculate about the act of "believing."

I will continue to devote myself to creating works in the field of speculative design that stimulate imagination about the future. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Tokui for his enthusiastic guidance and to Mr. Matsumori for his technical support. (Kanna Momose)

Nao Tokui, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Media and Governance Profile

Source: General Affairs, Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office