ENDEAVOR
“Wander, explore and discover, in one continuous borderless world.”
This is the invitation from teamLab Borderless, the entity behind the MORI Building Digital Arts Museum. In 70 minutes inside the museum in Azabudai Hills, near the Roppongi train station in Tokyo, I had a most unique experience with my family last Sunday, July 7.
My daughter, who was with her husband and six year old son, recalled her sense of wonderment when she learned how to appreciate a three-dimensional picture in a magazine that I showed her when she was in kindergarten. She narrated this to my grandson who excitedly ran and posed for pictures during the tour. But this was such an exponential expansion of my daughter’s early childhood experience.
The exhibition area, nestled deep within a building complex, is reached by taking an escalator and navigating a maze-like set of rooms, each featuring a unique installation – truly awesome and memorable. To understand and appreciate fully what I had just witnessed, explored and imbibed, I searched for online backgrounders, and found Arc Lighting in Architecture from this website: https://www.arc-magazine.com/teamlab/.
According to Arc, teamLab, founded by Toshiyuki Inoko and several of his friends, aimed at creating “a laboratory to experiment in collaborative creation,” has mushroomed into “an international, interdisciplinary group of specialists across a wide spectrum of sectors” including artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects, whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology and the natural world.
The visionaries thought: “In order to understand the world around them, people separate it into independent entities with perceived boundaries between them. teamLab seeks to transcend these boundaries in our perception of the world, of the relationship between the self and the world, and the continuity of time.”
Founded in 2001, it was not until 2011 that the collective’s efforts gathered momentum. Recalling how they struggled in the early years, the collective shared their dynamic transformation: “We believed in the power of digital technology and creativity and kept creating something new, no matter what genre it would turn out to be. While we took part in various projects to sustain ourselves, we increased the number of technologists, such as architects, CG animators, painters and hardware engineers.”
Its Forest of Flowers and People: Lost, Immersed and Reborn piece “was created with a specialist who creates 3D CG flower models and animation, a 3D software programmer, an engineer who designs equipment such as projectors, a software programmer who localizes and integrates dozens of projectors within the space, and an architect.”
Business managers who are boxed within traditional mindsets and textbook concepts could imbibe some lessons from teamLab members “whose creativity is based on ‘multidimensionality,’ where members with different specialties create together by crossing their boundaries, as well as their ‘transferrable knowledge’ – a type of knowledge that can be shared and reused. Their synergy generates “collective creation, the creation of something of a higher quality by a group, which they feel strengthens the entire team.”
In the exhibition area, visitors walk through a maze of narrow, low-ceiling corridors that lead into theatre-like, expansive areas where people are literally bathed in lights and colors that travel upward, downward, sideways and diagonally, in flowing motion and at varying speeds. It is superlatively immersive: one is surrounded and engaged so fully, and one feels completely involved, soaking in the experience like never before.
Light is a key element: “A vital feature within teamLab’s work is the use of light; whether this is through digital projections on pieces such as Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and People – Infinity and Universe of Water Particles on a Rock Where People Gather, or a more transformative, immersive effect on installations such as Light Vortex and the Floating Nest, where viewers are placed at the heart of a swirling, colorful light show.”
Another important learning is a keener appreciation of human interaction.
Recall your experience in an art gallery. The presence of other viewers could be distracting, even annoying. So we are now told: “What teamLab aims to do is to be able to feel the presence of others as something more beautiful than ever before.”
An alternative scenario has been invented: “In art installations with the viewers on one side and interactive artworks on the other, the artworks themselves undergo changes caused by the presence and behavior of the viewers. This has the effect of blurring the boundary between the two sides. The viewers actually become part of the artworks themselves.”
To ensure that “viewers are immersed in the alternate reality of the installations has become a calling card for teamLab, and is something that the collective seeks to instill in each of its exhibitions.” Their message to exhibition viewers: “A type of interactivity we pursue is one in which your presence transforms the work, whether or not you intend to do so. If you find a change caused by someone else to be beautiful, that person’s presence may become beautiful as well.”
Indeed, digital technology has freed humanity from the limits of static media of expression, such as canvas and paint, as it “allows human expression to become free from these physical constraints, enabling it to exist independently and evolve freely.” This enhanced autonomy expands the dimensions of creativity. Beyond being a passive witness, the viewer becomes an active participant in the artistic experience.