teamLab, 2019, Interactive Digital Installation, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

There’s an expansiveness, freedom and openness to change in teamLab’s digital installations.

In their words: “teamLab believes that the digital domain can expand the capacities of art, and that digital art can create new relationships between people.” (teamLab website)

This year, a major teamLab immersive digital installation was featured at the opening of the Tank Shanghai art complex, titled Universe of Water Particles (2019); a cascading waterfall that responded to people’s “touch”. When an individual “touched” the streaming water it then flowed as if meeting a rock in a stream, which in turn caused flowers to scatter in the corresponding artwork Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live. It’s an artwork alive to the beauty of nature and its connection to humans, with a surreal edge in the use of digital technology to simulate this heightened awareness.

Using digital technology teamLab explore pre-modern Japanese notions of space, where 3-D reality was depicted as a flat/2D spatial awareness. TeamLab flip this perspective so that digital projections on flat surfaces become 3D spatial experiences. They term this spatial structuring as “ultrasubjective space”, resulting in immersive and transformative environments, where individuals engage with the work from their unique point of view. It’s also an interactive space where the individual’s very movements/behaviour can alter the artwork, becoming co-creators in its continuous unfolding. This blurring of the boundaries between the individual and the artwork is also enabled by “splitting, folding and dividing” the images/screens, creating a space of connection and fluidity, of mutability, where the artwork doesn’t feel bound by physical space and also, a sense of play and wonder.