A documentary about the future – concerning fake news

An Artist’s Talk by Yoshinori Niwa

Introduced by Shiro Masayuma

1pm – 2pm on Tuesday 6th June 2017

“Fake news” has rapidly become a catch-all term for dubious news stories that barely attempt to adhere to basic journalistic standards.  Artist Yoshinori Niwa looks beyond the headlines and wonders if these are the stories that people really want to hear.  Are we living in a post-truth era? Is ‘fake news’ more palatable than the ‘real’ news that we are presented with? Yoshinori Niwa’s documentary on the future will be fake, but it may uncover some unexpected truths.


“Fake news” is the widely accepted term for the plethora of fictional news stories that are darting around media outlets all over the world. In the post-truth era, media literacy and fact-checking are necessary to avoid misinformation or disinformation. However, it seems like an opportunity to think about the hidden desires that people have because most fake news seems to be a reflection of the desires that people already have.

I’ve started with a documentary about the future which is based on a fake news story that nobody expects in order to examine the structures or mechanisms of modern society.

By comparing to a selection of projects in the past five years including Communism Series (2010-2013), The Younger Ones Educate The Older Ones (2016), Paying a Courtesy Call on the Incumbent Mayor by all His Predecessors in History (2016), Selling the Right to Name a Pile of Garbage (2015), We’re heading to the place where nobody wants to go by the will of all (2017) and so on I will talk about the basic ideas and the concept of the ongoing project “All Japanese players boycott at the Tokyo Olympic Games” (2017-2020) which is a fake future documentary video project about the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, and which will be public just before the Olympics.

Yoshinori Niwa