When teamLab first emerged on the art scene in 2001,
their innovative creations were hard to label. Neither video nor media art, the
3D works used multiple perspectives to bring the Edo-painting period to life through
animation. The works were often intended to be shown on multiple screens, and
the different perspectives helped create what the Japanese art collective calls
an “ultra-subjective space” with no fixed viewpoint or barrier between the
viewer and the projection surface so people can move around freely.
In search of a description, Toshiyuki Inoko, co-founder
of teamLab, remembers looking up the definition of “digital art” at the time in
the Japanese Wikipedia and all he could find was a vague description associating
digital art with the photo editing software, Photoshop.
Today, teamLab has come to symbolize the best that
digital art has to offer as they harness the power of digital technology to
create immersive art installation that highlight the beauty of the natural
world while encouraging interaction with the artwork as well as with other
viewers.
Inoko, who studied mathematical engineering and information
physics, founded teamLab in 2001 with four university friends. The collective
has grown from the small team of programmers and web designers who primarily
worked on commercial projects to a 450-strong team from various fields (web and
print graphic designers, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians,
architects), split between the commercial arm (team-lab.com) and the artistic
arm (teamlab.art), which inspire and feed from each other. While Inoko focuses
on running the artistic arm, his co-founders manage the commercial arm, which
for a very long time sustained the artistic practice.
The collective worked on artistic projects from the
start, but Inoko says their creations were not considered “art” until they were
given their big break by fellow Japanese artist Takashi Murakami who invited
them to show in his Kaikai Kiki gallery in Taipei in 2011. The following year,
a Singapore-based art gallerist Ikkan Sanada started representing them.
“The history of digital art is a short one and many
people are still confusing it with video art. Slowly, art institutions and
collectors are discovering and understanding the unique characteristics of
teamLab’s digital art which eliminates the physical boundaries of artwork and
the viewers,” Sanada says.
The Singapore-connection was strengthened when the Singapore
Biennale 2013 provided the first museum/institutional opportunity at a time
when the collective was still relatively unknown, recalls Inoko. The work
selected for the biennale was “Peace Can Be Realized Even Without Order,” an
interactive animated diorama with an army of dancing holograms dressed in
traditional Japanese costume that became animated as viewers navigated the
installation.
The ArtScience Museum at Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands
complex was the first museum to offer the collective a large permanent
exhibition space with the “Future World: Where Art Meets Science” exhibition. teamLab
now also has a permanent installation at the National Museum of Singapore, and last
December unveiled another large digital art exhibit at Marina Bay Sands, though
this time within The Shoppes at MBS.
Interaction is at the heart of many teamLab creations, as
the collective seeks to fully immerse the viewers within their artworks, encouraging
them to move around the work, which affects the work as well as encouraging
other viewers to participate. As people walk around an installation, they may
trigger flowers to bloom or cause them to wilt, transform a calligraphic
character into the object it represents, or cause the direction of shoal of
fish to change.
As Inoko explains, teamLab’s artworks aim to blur boundaries
between art and technology, people and the art as well as among people
themselves. While the viewing of traditional art, be it painting or sculpture,
is usually best enjoyed from a particular point of view — the fewer people in a
museum, the better one can enjoy the work — teamLab’s artworks positively
encourage and sometime demand the presence of a multitude of viewers. Having
others in the same artistic space will create variation of the art, with each
visitors adding to the complexity of the artwork, creating unique visual
stimuli.
In teamLab’s interactive light sculpture installation, “Crystal
Universe,” visitors are invited to walk through a constellation of suspended
LED lights that react to the visitors’ presence by changing colors. People can
further interact with the piece through their smartphone, each phone user having
an impact on the work.
In “Strokes of Life,” one of the works recently installed
at the former ice rink at The Shoppes at MBS, viewers create large brush
strokes (what the collective calls Spatial Calligraphy) by walking around the space
which in turn gives life to colorful blooming flowers, birds and butterflies.
Instead of being pre-recorded and on a loop, the work is rendered in real time
by a computer program and based on the interaction, ensuring the experience is
never repeated exactly the same.
Honor Harger, Executive Director of ArtScience Museum,
says the museum was “naturally drawn” to teamLab's work because of their fluid
combination of artistic expression, technological ingenuity and scientific
enquiry. "By physically positioning us inside the landscape, teamLab are
inviting us to understand that nature is something that includes, enfolds, and
embraces people. There is no separation between ourselves and
nature."
Harger points out that teamLab’s works, while beautiful
in appearance also address important contemporary issue such as climate change:
“The belief that we are somehow separate to, and apart from, nature, has become
an urgent existential issue. We need projects that create meaningful
connections between people and their environment. To address some of the
challenges we face today, we need to understand that we are within, and not
outside of, the natural world."
In 2014, the New York-based Pace Gallery, a leading
international art gallery with outposts in Paris, London, Hong Kong, Beijing,
Seoul, and Palo Alto, started representing the collective, helping it stage
large-scale exhibitions that have helped quickly solidify its international
reputation. The projects have also grown in scale.
Last year, an immersive installation, “A Forest Where
Gods Live,” was its most ambitious project to date, spread across a 500,000sqm
ancient garden on Kyushu island with the collective using nature as the canvas
for this work. As visitors walked up winding garden paths, they triggered
sensors for colored lights and sounds for the various components of this giant installation
— a digital waterfall, a spatial calligraphy projection at the entrance of a
cave, a projection of blooming and withering flowers on a large moss covered
boulder.
A version of this article was published in Prestige Singapore in March 2018.
A version of this article was published in Prestige Singapore in March 2018.