ART

teamLAB IS AT THE TIPPING POINT BETWEEN ART & TECHNOLOGY

step into the future of art

By Alvin Kim

teamLab will overwhelm you

For years futurists have predicted that technology is going to take over every aspect of our lives. And I guess it’s happening — even leaving your home without a cell phone feels dangerous. But this is nothing new. Since the Industrial Revolution, modern technological improvements have reconfigured how people live in radical ways. How we communicate and interact (remember the phone was once shocking), our transportation, and even how we treat diseases. Now that technology is starting to fully infiltrate the art world (does anyone care about paintings anymore?) the question is what is it doing to art? And maybe, what is art doing to technology.

In 2017 in Jamsil, a wealthy neighborhood in Seoul, I had my first digital museum experience. As I stood there, I could see nothing but a dark hallway with a dim light standing at the end of the hall. The crowd descended into the dark expecting wonderful things. All of a sudden you enter a room of vivid, bright, and pulsating light. All I could say was “Wow.”

A long corridor to what?

The exhibition was called teamLab World Dance! Art Museum, Learn & Play! Future Park. The experience wasn’t just that first room as fun as it was, but many different rooms of radically different but equally amazing effects. Every room was interactive and was programmed to respond to you. One simple trick was that different actions and participants would trigger changes in color. As you progress through the installation, the audience experiences strange and new environments — sometimes you’re confronted with a waterfall, and sometimes you’re lost in space. Anything seems possible.

teamLab was founded as an art collective, interdisciplinary group. They refer to themselves as “ultra-technologists” seeking to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, design and the nature of the world. Various specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects combine to form the teamLab collective.

Given the complexity and scope of the installations, it is easy to wonder how it is all accomplished, organized, and planned. The teamLab collaboration numbers over four hundred individuals, all of who have their roles and purposes within the organization. The whole organization is rooted in the traditional and the contemporary. teamLab believes that digital technologies will lead us to more freedom and greater possibilities of expression.

Is everything possible?

Before people started accepting the concept of digital technology, the information had to come in products — phones, ipads, watches, etc. The same applies to art. The creative arts and especially the fine arts (painting and sculpture) have remained for the most part outside the realm of technology. What teamLab has done is push art into technology with a robust and vicious shove. No longer confined to physical media, digital technology has made it possible for art to expand. Since digital art can quickly develop, it provides teamLab with a higher degree of autonomy within the space. teamLab is able to manipulate and use much larger areas, and viewers can experience the artwork more directly.

In January 2018, teamLab partnered with the local urban landscape developer Mori Building Co.Ltd to establish their largest, primary exhibition that launched in June 2018. The space is 110,000 square feet, containing five zones and spread out over two floors in a single building in Tokyo’s Odaiba district. There are approximately 50 different interactive artworks for the show, which is called teamLab Borderless. The exhibition is called Borderless because the interactive spaces have no borders separating them from the other works. There is a lot of blurring of boundaries. teamLab has stated that “Since there are no boundaries, the immersive works keep the boundaries between people in a state of continuous flux.”

Are there really no boundaries

The aspects of digital technology allow artworks to express the capacity to change much more freely. Viewers, interacting with their environment, can instigate and experience constant change. Through an interactive relationship between the viewers and the artwork, viewers become an intrinsic part of the whole. Within the exhibition, one can touch, see, and make changes to the environment physically and experience interactive artworks from teamLab in collaboration alongside the other visitors.

Within the point of view of the audience, many things can be different. When an artwork changes based on the presence or behavior of visitors, it causes the boundaries between artwork and the view to becoming blurred. In this case, the audience becomes part of the artwork itself. Similarly, when the artwork changes due to the presence of others, those people also become part of the artwork. This expands the usually quiet, personal relationship between a piece of art and the viewer into something far more communal and unique. You're able to see other people interacting with space as well as other people seeing you; that’s a subtle differenced, but in the end that’s two distinct experiences merged into one.

The future?

When technology is in mixture with art, is it still art? A question so vague and confusing to decode, it still leaves many question marks when it comes to defining the “art” teamLab produces. In definition, it mentions “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.” If people use technology to express and apply human creative skills and imagination, can’t that be art? In reference, I think that just because one didn’t use the traditional methods to produce art, doesn’t mean it cannot be seen as art. The debate between what is art and what is not has been a discussion for a long time. However, I think it needs to come to an agreement of a certain decision. What are your thoughts?

©Alvin Kim and the CCA Arts Review