Japanese digital art collective teamLab’s interactive and immersive exhibits coming to USA this year

Digital art collective teamLab are known for their stunning and immersive creations which have become a favourite of photographers and online influencers everywhere. Although their art is known all over the world, most of their work can be found in permanent and temporary exhibitions in their native Japan and other Asian countries.

So if you’re a resident of the USA who has been scrolling jealously through Instagram, desperate for the full teamLab experience, you’ll be thrilled to know that some temporary exhibits are coming to the new Superblue facility opening in Miami, December 2020.

Superblue will be dedicated to experiential art, and as such, installations by teamLab will be found among the work of other artists such as Es Devlin and James Turrell.

teamLab’s opening exhibition will be called ‘Between Life and Non-Life’, and will include several different fully immersive and interactive pieces.

Through interactivity, teamLab play with the boundary between the art and the viewer. For example, in ‘Universe of Water Particles, Transcending Boundaries’, the onlookers can obstruct the particles of ‘falling water’, and change the flow.

Not just the divide between art and onlooker, teamLab also play with the boundaries between art and art. The water from the ‘Universe of Water Particles’ installation influences the flowers in the next piece, ‘Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together - Transcending Boundaries, A Whole Year per Hour’. In one hour, a year’s worth of seasonal flowers bloom within this artwork in a never-ending cycle. Rather than a pre-recorded image on repeat, each cycle is created in realtime by a computer program, and can also be affected by the movements of the visitors.

‘Proliferating Immense Life - A Whole Year per Year’ is a similar concept, but rather than speeding up the process to an hour at a time, the floral cycle mimics the pace of real life. Each moment can only be experienced once, as like the previous display, a new image is created each time by the computer program and affected by outside forces.

‘Life Survives by the Power of Life’ is one for calligraphy fans. In accordance with the overarching theme of ‘Life and Non-Life’, the kanji character for life 生 (sei), will be written in three-dimensional spatial calligraphy. This technology can express the various artistic features of calligraphic brushstrokes such as depth, speed and power.