December 26, 2023
Asuka Ishii (4th-year student, Faculty of Policy Management), a member of the Masashi Nakatani Laboratory led by an associate professor at the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, and Kazuki Nagata (4th-year student, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies), a member of the Takahiro Kunieda Laboratory led by a professor at the Faculty of Policy Management and the Akira Wakita Laboratory led by a professor at the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, have won the Bronze Award in the Freestyle Computing category at the NTV Imaginarium Award 2023.
The NTV Imaginarium Award is an art competition hosted by Nippon Television Network Corporation that recognizes works and projects using media technology that expands into the metaverse space. Held for the first time to commemorate the 70th anniversary of NTV's founding, the award judged works in three categories based on the themes of "Imagination," "Innovation," and "Sustainability": the Metaverse category, the XR category, and the Freestyle Computing category.
Ishii and Nagata's work won the Bronze Award in the "Freestyle Computing category," which proposes original styles that traverse the worlds of reality and artificial reality through technology and science.
The award-winning work, "*Photos are for illustrative purposes only," was highly praised for the originality of its creative process. The process involved taking an AI-generated image of Enoshima and then, through an act of imitation, searching for a similar location in the real Enoshima to take a photograph that matched the clothing and colors as closely as possible. This approach used AI to explore the relationship between photographs, images, and reality.
Award-Winning Work
*Photos are for illustrative purposes only
Asuka Ishii + Kazuki Nagata
Comments from the Winners
We are greatly honored to receive such an award.
This work involves taking photographs to resemble AI-generated images as closely as possible, contrasting them, and uploading them to the internet. We created this work while thinking about things like images on the internet, biases created by datasets, the desire for consumption, and the origin of placeness. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to everyone in our laboratories and all those involved who provided guidance for this work upon receiving this award.
Source: General Affairs Section, Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office