It’s taken time, but slowly but surely, the art world is slowly turning its back on analogue and going digital. Nowhere is that clearer than with the opening of the first solely digital art museum in the world, launched by Japanese art collective teamLab earlier this month. The huge, 10,000 sqm space, officially known as the Mori Building Digital Art Museum, is a world first; divided up into five zones and featuring 520 computers and 470 projectors, teamLab have transformed a traditional space -- a museum -- into something futuristic, groundbreaking and challenging.

 

teamLab’s Takashi Kudo wanted the exhibition to deliver a “borderless artwork world”, as he explains to MutualArt. “We needed to establish the museum itself to make that happen, and Mori Building provided us with the chance to realise our ideas.” “teamLab aims to explore a new relationship between humans and nature through art. Digital technology has allowed us to liberate art from the physical and transcend boundaries. We see no boundary between ourselves and nature; one is in the other and the other in one. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous continuity of life. This is teamLab’s universal concept throughout our creation.”

 

 

For Takashi and the rest of the teamLab collective, digital art exists on a separate plane, liberated from the constraints of material substance. In their Mori museum then, they hope to transfer the feelings and thoughts that visitors would have got from a physical artwork through their own bodies, relationships and experiences. “If an artist can put thoughts and feelings directly into people's experiences, artworks too can move freely, form connections and relationships with people, and have the same concept of time as the human body”, he explains. “Artworks can transcend boundaries, influence and sometimes intermingle with each other. In this way, all the boundaries between artist, people and artworks, dissolve and the world teamLab Borderless is created.”

As visitors walk freely around the museum then, they are expected to lose themselves in an alternate, artwork based, borderless world, immersing themselves in each experience. While the museum is not divided up, there are five zones which exist to express the concept of the works more clearly. In Borderless World, visitors are invited to understand and recognize the world through their bodies, moving freely and forming connections and relationships with others. teamLab Borderless is a group of artworks that form one borderless world. Artworks move out of the rooms freely, form connections and relationships with people, communicate with other works, influence and sometimes intermingle with each other, and have the same concept of time as the human body.

In Athletics Forest, teamLab have manufactured a “creative physical space” that trains spatial recognition ability by promoting the growth of the hippocampus of the brain. It is based on the concept of understanding the world through the body and thinking of the world three-dimensionally. In a complex, physically challenging, three-dimensional space, immerse your body in an interactive world. The interactive aspect continues in Future Park, an educational project based on the concept of "collaborative creativity, co-creation". It is an amusement park where you can enjoy the world creatively and freely with others.

A beautifully lit Forest of Lamps is next, with interconnected lights spreading out continuously as a metaphor for human interaction, while in En Tea House, visitors are invited to join in a magical experience, making tea while watching a flower bloom inside the teacup. The flowers bloom infinitely as long as there is tea, so the tea in the bowl becomes an infinite world in which the flowers continue to bloom.

Whether teamLab’s museum is an example of the art world becoming more digital in general, the collective admits they don’t know. But, they explain, digital technology allows artistic expression to be released from the material world and for ideas and experiences to change and flow more freely. “In art installations with the viewers on one side and interactive artworks on the other, the artworks themselves undergo changes caused by the presence and behavior of the viewers. This has the effect of blurring the boundary lines between the two sides”, explains Takashi. “The viewers actually become part of the artworks themselves. The relationship between the artwork and the individual then becomes a relationship between the artwork and the group. Whether or not another viewer was present within that space five minutes before, or the particular behavior exhibited by the person next to you suddenly becomes an element of great importance.

“At the very least, compared to traditional art viewing, people will become more aware of those around them. That's right — art now has the ability to influence the relationship between the people standing in front of the artworks.”

Takashi and teamLab believe then that the digital domain can help to expand art and change how we view the capacities of art in our world, which can actually help us to create new relationships between people. “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. We hope that this exhibit will encourage people to rethink the relationship between humans and nature as well as their relationship with the world”, says Takashi.

“The paradigm in traditional art has been to treat the existence of other viewers as a nuisance. If you are at an exhibition with no other viewers, for example, you are likely to think of yourself as extremely lucky. Yet in the exhibition put together by teamLab, we encourage people to think of the presence of other viewers as a positive factor. The importance of this shift in thinking stretches even 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.”