teamLab: Impermanent Flowers Floating in a Continuous Sea
Location: 2. floor, Great Hall
Founded in 2001, teamLab is one of the world’s best-known creators of digital art. Their compelling spatial installations have changed the perception of art created with digital technology and have made it accessible to millions of viewers around the world. This is art without boundaries: through technology it surrounds and immerses the viewer, who is engaged physically, with all the senses.
teamLab is a manifestation of an art movement that celebrates early 21st century technology and its potential to create harmony between the human body and mind, and between man and nature. Their artworks seem to reflect the human dream of something more ideal than life itself. It is up to the viewer whether to interpret teamLab’s art as simply beautiful aesthetic works or as a socially charged critique of the future of the environment.
Three works will be on display at the Kumu Art Museum, depicting the eternally repeating cycles of nature in the form of continuous waves, flowers that grow and wilt, and flames. The exhibition will engage visitors in a teamLab way: using a mobile app, anyone can light a flame on their phone, or influence the flowers growing on the wall with a wave of a hand.
“All oceans are connected to each other, and so are all the waves of the world. In classical East Asian art, waves are often expressed using a combination of lines. These waves created by lines allow us to realise that each wave is one part of a larger flow and conveys life as though the waves are a living entity. When the waves rise, we can feel a powerful breath of life, as though life is blooming. It seems that each wave has a life of its own. But when the waves collapse and disappear, we realise, with a sense of fragility, that they were a part of the ocean. And that ocean is connected to all of the other oceans.
The waves seem alive because life is like a rising wave. It is a miraculous phenomenon that continuously emerges from a single, continuous ocean.
The artwork space consists of one continuous and connected wave, with neither beginning nor end. The exterior of this perceived mass is also its interior, and the external and internal are one.
Inside the mass of waves, ever-blossoming flowers continually grow and wither in a repeating and ever-changing cycle of life and death. The waves and flowers do not form a fixed a viewpoint, which allows people to move freely around the space. The wall on which the work is projected does not become a boundary between people and the work, and the space filled with flowers is continuous with the space of the people experiencing the work.
The flame artwork duplicates and distributes itself among people, and once the artwork is in the hands of people, it is further actively distributed. The flame will exist on people’s networks, transforming into decentralised, Distributed Art. When the flame exists on a network, it will continue to exist even if the original flame disappears.”
teamLab
Coordinator: Inga Jaagus
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