Happy New Year 2025: teamLab

I can’t think of a nicer way to end 2024’s blog posts than with images from the beautiful immersive digital installation, Proliferating Immense Life - A Whole Year per Year, by the Japanese artistic collective teamLab. If images from this installation don’t put you in a good mood for 2025, then nothing will! The most fantastic part of teamLab’s installations is that the images change when visitors touch any surface on the wall or floor.

teamLab (founded 2001, Tokyo), sound by Takahashi Hideaki (born 1969, Japan), January, from the installation Proliferating Immense Life - A Whole Year per Year, part of a series based on teamLab's Spirit of the Flowers (2018), 2020. Interactive digital installation with sound, duration: 9 minutes, 35 seconds. © 2024 teamLab. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York. (8S-30617)

All the months in Proliferating Immense Life - A Whole Year per Year can be viewed on the teamLab website. The following description of the artwork comes from this page on the teamLab site.

In the same flow of time as in the real world, flowers change with the seasons.

Flowers repeat the cycle of birth and death, proliferation and extinction, changing along with the seasons. 

When people touch the flowers, they fall and die. The flowers are also influenced by other works, falling and dying due to other works.

The world of the artwork is flattened through teamLab's concept of Ultrasubjective Space. Unlike when flattening by lenses or perspective, the viewer's viewpoint is not fixed, and the viewer's body is free to move. The wall on which the world of the work is depicted does not become a boundary between the people and the work; the flowers blur the boundary between the walls, and the world of the work is continuous with the space where the people's bodies are located.

The use of light in or as a work of art has been explored periodically since the early 1900s. Light was usually used in limited ways where devices were programmed to produce shifting patterns of colored light. These experiments originated at Bauhaus during the 1920s in the motion and light experiments of László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). In the United States, the inventor of the color organ (Clavilux), Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968), created early experimental combinations of light and color.

The combination of film and works of art occurred widely in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the advent of Happenings. The only documentation of these temporary art performances was photography or film. By the late 1960s, the impact of television as a major cultural phenomenon spawned the use of TV imagery in works of art, both still and projected.

By the mid-1970s, video was becoming a new art medium. Video artworks evolved through the 1980s into the 1990s, when it was universally accepted as a fine art form. In the 21st century, sophisticated video art, augmented by digital or manual manipulation, has elevated the art form to become part of both gallery and museum collections. Video work can form part of an art installation, create immersive installations, and be projected in monumental proportions in or on architecture.

Known for their monumental digital installations, the international media arts collective, teamLab, was founded in Tokyo in 2001 by now-CEO Toshiyuki Inoko (born 1977). A graduate of the University of Tokyo in mathematical engineering and information physics, Inoko works with an interdisciplinary team of hundreds of people, including artists, programmer, engineers, CG animators, architects, web and print designers, and editors. The focus of the collective is to explore the relationship of humans to the world around them through perceptions enhanced by contemporary digital art. 

Rather than observe the artificial social and perceptual boundaries human communities formulate, teamLab seeks to break down these barriers through their flowing, mesmerizing digital environments that symbolize the never-ending flow of time and space. The team refers to themselves as “ultratechnologists” with the goal of combining art, creativity, technology and science into immersive digital experiences. Many of their installations rely on the Japanese artistic tradition of what Inoko calls “subjective space,” pertaining to the digitally created visual space not based on Western perspective or science. This is a reference to the traditional layered spatial arrangement in Japanese monochromatic landscape paintings.

teamLab, sound by Takahashi Hideaki, February, from the installation Proliferating Immense Life - A Whole Year per Year, part of a series based on teamLab's Spirit of the Flowers (2018), 2020. Interactive digital installation with sound, duration: 9 minutes, 35 seconds. © 2024 teamLab. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York. (8S-30618)

Correlations to Davis programs: SchoolArts Collection: Media Arts, The Visual Experience 4E: 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.8