Then, the Time for Real Challenge Began

After the film festival, Prof.Iwabuchi and her team invited Ms.Kanako Hayashi, the director, and Mr.Shozo Ichiyama, the program director of Tokyo FILMeX in a small professional meeting to discuss the merits, demerits and future possibility in the use of VOLUMEONE. Their opinion, including the analysis on the response from the audience, over all was a positive one. So the team decided to extend a call for participation to other art organizations to experiment with VOLUMEONE. They had wished to work with small museums in the vicinity in a hope to create audio guide and educational programs using VOLUMEONE.

In fact, prior to Tokyo FILMeX, Kawasaki City Museum and DMC Institute came to an agreement for conducting a collaborative research as this museum is well known to have the 2nd largest collection of films and video in the country. Both parties started looking for appropriate materials for digitization and the subject they chose is the TVCM series of a leading food company, Momoya Co.,Ltd. The collection of 218 TVCMs since 1958 has been donated to the museum directly from the company at the time of inauguration and the museum was given the right to use them for education and research in any forms. With the support of Momoya Co., Ltd., Kawasaki City Museum and DMC Institute digitized all 218 TVCMs in appropriate data format so that these video clips can be uploaded to VOLUMEONE and approximately 150 pieces that had no conflict in copyright were chosen to be shown on line. This process took them nearly 6 months, but finally, 2 parties are discussing to figure out the ways to utilize these valuable data together with art critic, sociologist and historians. One definite merit about video sharing is that you can invite scholars and artists who live far away to join the discussion on line. They will eventually have an on line exhibition of Momoya TVCMs in historical context and also plan to have a conference and school programs on site next year as a result of this collaboration.