Aiming to re-examine the increasingly diversified manners of creating and appreciating images, The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions has been dedicated to “imagery” not as an exclusive category, but with an eye to the various alternative views it embraces. The ultimate goal of our continuous efforts is to establish a platform for promoting and sustaining alternative visions that art and imagery can inspire in us.

Within the 10+ years during which the festival has repeatedly introduced image-based works from Japan and abroad, along a general theme that asks anew for each edition, “What is imagery?”, the circumstances surrounding imagery have changed dramatically. Against the backdrop of such changing social conditions in terms of imagery, the festival’s 2023 edition – the 15th in total – marks the start of various new programs, including the ”Commission Project,” to dig even deeper into the question what imagery is all about. The idea behind these endeavors is to reinforce the function of a constant platform that this festival aims to assume.

THIS YEAR‘S THEME "Technology"


 Photography, film, video, animation – all these are forms of imagery that we encounter within everyday life. Having significantly developed since the 19th century, the various imaging technologies we have today enable us to handle even high-resolution images and longer moving pictures. We can perhaps say that these technologies have been developed for the purpose of creating images with even higher definition, and greater amounts of information. One aspect that comes along with technology, is its popularization and establishment as a tool for broad, general use. But who is it, and how and when, that the criteria for sharing technologies are determined? High-resolution movies have become a common standard today, but who can say what kind of reality they will represent in the eyes of those who look at them 100 years from now? When looking back on history, we come across examples of technologies that worked when applied as an unexpected element. Adding a “handmade” touch to a high-resolution movie, for example, can increase its sense of reality, and it happens that the works of artists emerge from such kind of dialogue with technology, with the potential to trigger completely unforeseen discoveries. With a focus on “technology” as a general theme, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2023 examines a diverse range of activities in the field of imagery and other visual creation, with the aim to explore various possibilities regarding the dialogue between art and technology.