Conversation with teamLab-om prepared by Hristina Mikić
Digital technology can expand art, and that art made in this way can create new relationships between people.
teamLab
teamLab, an international art collective, was first founded in 2001. Its nature-inspired works are created through interdisciplinary investigations of digital technologies. The aim was to create experiments in art and to explore what the world means for humans through technology. teamLab was founded in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko and several of his friends to create a “laboratory to experiment in collaborative creation”, i.e. “teamLab”. teamLab’s interest is to create new experiences through art, and through such experiences, they want to explore what the world is for humans.
Ever since the founding of teamLab, we’ve created through the process of collaborative creation as a collective. teamLab is a laboratory by a team, a place where the team experiments, a place for experimental creations
In the beginning, teamLab had neither the opportunity to present ourselves, nor could we imagine how to economically sustain their art creation. On the other hand, they believed in the power of digital technology and creativity, and thus kept creating something new, no matter which genre it would turn out to be. teamLab took part in various projects to sustain themselves by including a number of architects, CG animators, painters, mathematicians and hardware engineers.
teamLab’s creativity is based on multidimensionality, where members with different specialties create together by crossing their boundaries, as well as their transferable knowledge, a type of knowledge that can be shared and reused. As a result, teamLab generates what we call 'collective creation', the creation of something of higher quality by a group, thus strengthening an entire team. An individual person may not be directly involved in the project but his or her shareable knowledge might be. This continuous process of creating and discovering the transferable knowledge at a high speed yields the power of the group. It is organizations like this, able to uncover vast troves of knowledge, that differentiate themselves.
Knowledge can be uncovered in all parts of the creative process. If small, detailed, yet versatile knowledge is shared by a team, this will develop into a strength, leading to new projects or the improvement of present artworks. This results in an overall improvement in the quality of our creations. Creating art is always difficult. Our artworks are created by a team of hands-on experts through a continuous process of creation and thinking. Although the large concepts are always defined from the start, the project goal tends to remain unclear, so we need the whole team to create and think as we go along.
From the first smaller scale art works, the collective has reached the creative phase of interactive installations of large-scale light sculptures and immersive art worlds created by sensors, LEDs and projectors. In teamLab, artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects collaborate and even come up with their own, original technological solutions. They offer immersive and interactive art experiences that are changing peoples’ sensory perception and worldview.
Conceptually, teamLab‘s works explore digital art, time and space, natural phenomena, relationships between people, co-creativity, boundaries between works of art and the human body. Thus, through interdisciplinary conceptualizations of space, natural light and the boundaries of the body, more than ten works that speak to the beauty and properties of crystals were created.
How does digital art change the way people interact? What is the vision of teamLab in this way, especially concerning your focus on interactiveness with art and how your team through digital art installations contributes to this process?
The characteristics of digital technology allow artworks to express the capacity for change much more freely. Viewers, in interaction with their environment, can instigate perpetual change in an artwork. Through an interactive relationship between the viewers and the artwork, viewers become an intrinsic part of that artwork. For example, within teamLab’s interactive artworks, because viewers’ movement or even their presence transforms the artwork, the boundaries between the work and viewers become ambiguous. Viewers become a part of the work. This changes the relationship between an artwork and an individual into a relationship between an artwork and a group of individuals. A viewer who was present 5 minutes ago, or how the person next to you is behaving now, suddenly becomes important. Unlike a viewer who stands in front of a conventional painting, a viewer immersed in an interactive artwork becomes more aware of other people’s presence.
Unlike a physical painting on a canvas, the non-material digital technology can liberate art from the physical. Furthermore, because of its ability to transform itself freely, it can transcend boundaries. By using such digital technology, we believe art can expand the beautiful. And by making interactive art, you and others’ presence becomes an element to transform an artwork, hence creating a new relationship between people within the same space.
By applying such art to the unique environment, we wanted to create a space where you can feel that you are connected with other people in the world. Once the large concept of the artwork is set, we gather specialized members related to the work and think more finely. For example, the Forest of Flowers and People: Lost, Immersed and Reborn piece, which is in teamLab Borderless in Tokyo, was created with a specialist who creates 3D CG flower model 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, an architect, and so on.
From teamLab’s point of view, we think that new digital technology (as tools or materials) will go on to change art, not just extending artworks into a new era, but changing the art space and museum itself, as well as the way people interact and experience art, and even the art market
Glass in immersive digital arts
Crystal of Light is a light sculpture by teamLab. It is a space made up of hundreds of lights whose heads move up and down. Thus, hundreds of light beams intersect and form three-dimensional light forms like those that occur when daylight is refracted in a crystal glass. These forms of light are projected onto the viewer who thus exists in the essence of light.
The Infinite Crystal Universe is an interactive light sculpture that shows best the potential of teamLab‘s technological solutions. It is a space made of million LED bulbs whose programming makes three-dimensional shapes in space. As the programming of the lights is interconnected with the programming of sound, a spatial audiovisual experience is created. People moving through that space can use a smartphone application and select one of the offered stars which will appear as three-dimensional in the crystal universe. Depending on the stars that are thrown into the artwork, the number of people in the space, and their interactions with the space using their phones, the crystal universe changes constantly and unpredictably. Thus, every moment spent in it is unique and unrepeatable.
For various public spaces such as mall, teamLab created the Crystal Tree and Crystal Fireworks. Both works are based on the assembly of many threads of LED bulbs. The lights of the stringed bulbs create different three-dimensional light figures. At the teamLab Crystal Tree with Graffiti Nature installation, which is on view (seasonal exhibit) at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, the audience can use a smartphone application to choose the decorations that will appear on the tree. Similarly, when viewing teamLab Crystal Fireworks with Graffiti Nature, the audience can influence the colors and light scattering effects.
We want to know how the crystal inspires teamLab and what special characteristics it has which are attractive to their ultra-tech art installations?
It is hard to say how the crystal inspires us. All we can say is that some people feel “beautiful” to the crystal as like people feel flowers are beautiful too.
What we are interested in is science raises the resolution of the world. When humans want to know the world, they recognize it by separating things. In order to understand the phenomena of this world, people separate things one after another.
For example, the universe and the earth are continuous, however, humans recognize the earth by separating it from the universe. To understand the forest, humans break it down into trees, separating the tree from the whole. Humans then cut the tree into cells to recognize the tree, cut the cells into molecules to recognize the cells, and cut the molecules into atoms to understand the molecules, and so on. That is science, and that is how science increases the resolution of the world
But in the end, no matter how much humans divide things into pieces, they cannot understand the
entirety. Even though what people really want to know is the world, the more they separate, the farther they become from the overall perception. Humans, if left alone, recognize what is essentially continuous as separate and independent.
Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous continuity over an extremely long period of time, but human beings cannot recognize it without separating it into parts. People try to grasp the entirety by making each thing separate and independent. Even though we are nothing but part of the world, we sometimes feel as if there is a boundary between the world and ourselves, as if we are living independently. The continuity of life and death has been repeated for more than 4 billion years.
However, for humans, even 100 years ago is a fictional world. We are interested in why humans have this perception. How can we go beyond the boundaries of recognition?
Through art, we want to transcend the boundaries of our own recognition. We want to transcend human characteristics or tendencies to recognize the continuity. Art is a search for what the world is for humans. Art expands and enhances “beauty.” Art has changed the way people perceive the world. Groups move by logic, but individuals decide their actions by beauty.
Individual behaviors are determined not by rationality but by aesthetics. In other words, “beauty” is the fundamental root of human behavior. Art expands the notion of “beauty”. Art is what expands people's aesthetics, that is, changes people's behavior.
It may be the whole world or only a part of the entirety, but it is art that captures and expresses it without dividing it. Art is a process to approach the whole. And by sharing it with others, the way people perceive the world changes. Through the enjoyment of art, the notion of “beautiful” expands and spreads, which in turn changes people’s perceptions of the world. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous continuity over an extremely long period of time. We aim to create experiences through which visitors recognize this continuity itself as beautiful, hence changing or increasing the way humans perceive the world. Our intention is to change people’s standard of beauty, even if it requires a great deal of time.
teamLab‘s works became sought especially after the collective, at the invitation of Takashi Murakami, presented itself at the Singapore Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2011. In 2016, teamLab completed the permanent exhibition of the ArtScience Museum in Singapore called Future World Where Art Meets Science, ArtScience Museum, Singapore. Exhibitions in New York, London, Paris, Singapore, Silicon Valley, Beijing, Melbourne, and many more cities followed.
What teamLab wants to do is to enhance physical space itself by digital art. It doesn’t necessarily have to be you that intervenes with it. It can be other people, or a group of people that vaguely includes you. And instead of personal use, we want to make it usable by multiple people in the same space.
By digitizing the space, we can indirectly change the relationships between people inside. If the presence of others can trigger the space to change, they’d become a part of artwork. And if that change is beautiful, the presence of others can become something beautiful as well. By connecting art and digital technology, we think the presence of others can be made more positive.
In our exhibits, we want visitors to understand how digital technology can expand the conception of art, and furthermore, that these techniques can liberate art from a value system based only on physical materials. The importance of this shift in thinking stretches beyond the art world. In modern cities, the presence of other people around us, as well as their unpredictable and uncontrollable behavior, is often seen as an inconvenience to be endured. This is because the presence of each person and those in their vicinity do not have a visible effect on the city. If entire cities were to be wrapped in the type of digital art conceived of by teamLab, we believe that people would begin to see the presence of other residents in a more positive light.
teamLab’s ultra-technological works are in the spirit of the accelerated technological development of Asia. The collective equally receives invitations from galleries, museums, art events, business companies, and public authorities that are gentrifying and changing the image of city districts. Two permanent exhibitions of teamLab‘s work, teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM and teamLab Planets TOKYO, are in Tokyo and teamLab SuperNature Macao. The collective is now working on commissioned setups for Abu Dhabi, Hamburg, Jeddah and Utrecht as well.
digital technology allows human expression to become free
To understand how teamLab sees the power of interactive digital art in the future, we ask them about digital technology and human freedom.
Digital technology enables complex detail and freedom for change. The characteristics of digital technology allow artworks to express the capacity for change much more freely. Viewers, in interaction with their environment, can instigate perpetual change in an artwork. Through an interactive relationship between the viewers and the artwork, viewers become an intrinsic part of that artwork. Before people started accepting digital technology, information and artistic expression had to be presented in some physical form.
Creative expression has existed through static media for most of human history, often using physical objects such as canvas and paint. The advent of digital technology allows human expression to become free from these physical constraints, enabling it to exist independently and evolve freely.
No longer limited to physical media, digital technology has made it possible for artworks to expand physically. Since digital art can easily expand, it provides us with a greater degree of autonomy within the space. We are now able to manipulate and use much larger spaces, and viewers are able to experience the artwork more directly.
future of digital art
In the end of our conversation, we are interested to know what experimental technology will be popular and interesting in the future to be included in digital art?
We could say that technology is the core of our works, but technology is not the most important part. It is still just a material or tool for artworks. We have been creating digital art since the year 2001 with the aim of changing people’s values and contributing to societal progress. Although we initially had no idea where we could exhibit our art or how we could support the team financially, we also strongly believed in and were genuinely interested in the power of digital technology and creativity. We wanted to keep creating new things regardless of genre limitations, and we did.
Digital technology allows artistic expression to be released from the material world, gaining the ability to change form freely. The environments where viewers and artworks are placed together allow us to decide how to express those changes
On March 2024.