The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions is a unique event that offers a multiplicity of exhibitions and screenings of moving images, live events, talk sessions, and more. Held annually in Tokyo’s Ebisu (Yebisu) district, the festival aims to become a widely shared venue for ongoing dialogue and inquiry into the question of how to stimulate creative activity in the moving-image arena, develop excellence in moving-image expression and media, and carry our rich inheritance from the past into the present, and forward into the future.

The development of image and media technology has not only changed the way we see the world but has also had enormous influence on our bodies and the nature of their social context. The spread of a society of globally networked information now enables us to connect simultaneously with multiple others. A new kind of creativity has evolved that presupposes indiscriminate sharing as well as liberal propagation and downstream modification, drastically changing the nature of individuals and their relationships. To be replicable—to exist in multiple—questions the myth of the original. At the far end of multiple practices—those woven together from many parts or elements—the future is forming minute by minute. It is already happening within us.

Under the overarching theme “Multiple Future,” Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2017 hopes to consider the characteristics of images that involve duplicative techniques and the changes that their development has brought to individuals and to society.