TeamLab: Continuity

My friend, Yumiko, told me of the TeamLab show at the Asian Art Museum. Using present technology, TeamLab is known for using darkened rooms with walls and mirrors to create immersive environments of natural elements that move and grow on projected on the walls and floors. TeamLab is an art collective of artists, engineers, programmers, animators and architects from Tokyo, Japan. They create borderless digital artwork using advance technology. 

 

In the Continuity show at the Asian Art Museum, the spaces were filled with butterflies, flowers, fishes, crows and organic plant forms.  Inadvertently Yoriko and I discovered that the fish responded to our hands in one particular room and butterflies died when we shook our hands at swarms of butterflies. In another room, a participant waved her hand over a moving organic branch that responded by changing colors. The work reminded me of a communal Yayoi Kusama infinity room.

 

TeamLab plays with the planar concept in two-dimensional art from an East Asian perspective, that does not recognize the border between the viewer’s body in the world of the painting. In Western art, two-dimensional art has traditionally viewed as a window into another world. In the exhibition, they explore this spatial structure: creating artwork space in three dimensions on a computer to render the space in two dimensions without creating the border between the viewer’s body and the artwork. They call this construction “ultrasubjectvie space,” which appears as a video display and projection in the work, and does not became a boundary and is continuous with the viewers space in which the viewer’s body is present. 

 

We settled in one carpeted room with sloping walls we settled on the ground and the audience was immersed in an enclosed space of fish, stars, crows and butterflies. Only the ceiling was unadorned. It was an impressive exhibit nonetheless. The space was filled with participants filming the experience and talking selfies, a present de rigueur custom of documentation. phenomenon, the exhibit shows how technology is expanding our understanding of art and how positively people are responding to it when traditional museum spaces.