MONO NO AWARE's "Kamu Kamo Shikamo Ni Domo Kamo! (imai remix)" MV wins international AI creative award
MONO NO AWARE's music video "Kamu Kamo Shikamo Ni Domo Kamo! (imai remix)" has been selected for the AICA Award at "AICA 2025," an international award that recognizes global AI creativity.
"AICA" is an international creative award newly established and hosted this year by the General Incorporated Association AICA. For the award, AICA researched AI creative projects from around the world—regardless of genre—that generated new ideas or social impact, which were then judged by creators and researchers.
The original song, "Kamu Kamo Shikamo Ni Domo Kamo!," is a rap song based on a tongue twister that was broadcast on NHK's "Minna no Uta" in October and November 2019. A version of the song remixed by imai (group_inou) was released in July 2024, along with a music video directed, developed, and animated by video artist Baku Hashimoto. For the production of this MV, Hashimoto researched the history of character encoding and, with the help of AI artist and researcher Nao Tokui, developed a dedicated animation production software called "Unim." He created the animation by gathering characters with similar shapes and meanings one by one from the 140,000-character Unicode table and reconfigured it as stop-motion animation using a combination of a pen plotter and hand-drawing.
The judging panel commented on the work, stating, "The approach of not generating visuals with AI, but instead using AI-extracted data as a guide for video production while keeping the output completely under human control, demonstrates a potential direction for visual expression in the AI era."
A total of 23 works, including this one, were selected for the AICA Award. The Grand Prix was awarded to "Cyber Subin: Evolving Cultural Heritage through Human-AI Co-dancing," a video work that introduces "Human-AI co-dancing," which fuses a human dancer with a virtual partner.
Source: Music Natalie
*This content has been translated from Japanese into English using machine translation. We apologize for any mistakes in the current version, and will update accordingly.*