teamLab Borderless Museum Reopens in Early February 2024

Unveiling New Artworks to be Exhibited for the First Time in the World

teamLab Borderless Museum Reopens in Early February 2024

teamLab Borderless Museum Reopens in Early February 2024 – Japan’s renowned digital artwork team teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM (teamLab Borderless) is moving from its former location in Odaiba, Tokyo, and newly re-opening at Azabudai Hills in central Tokyo in early February 2024. 

teamLab Borderless is a world of artworks without boundaries, a museum without a map created by art collective teamLab. Leading up to the opening of the museum teamLab is working on creating brand new artworks, and has now unveiled the three installations – Bubble Universe: Physical Light, Bubbles of Light, Wobbling Light, and Environmental Light; Flowers and People – Megalith Crystal Formation (work in progress); and Black Waves – Megalith Crystal Formation (work in progress).

Bubble Universe is an interactive artwork part of teamLab’s latest art project, Existence in the Cognitive World. The artwork space comprises countless spheres, and inside each of the spheres, differing existences of light intermix. Through the work, teamLab posits that various phenomena exist continuously with their environment while exploring how people perceive the world and the notion of perception and existence.

In Megalith Crystal Formation (work in progress), the artworks without boundaries that create the world of teamLab Borderless move through the museum and into the room, creating one borderless world that connects in complex ways, eternally changing.

Newly Unveiled Artworks

Bubble Universe: Physical Light, Bubbles of Light, Wobbling Light, and Environmental Light

teamLab, 2023 (work in progress), Interactive Installation, LED, Endless, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

Inside the spheres, countless lights converge; material lights that exist in the physical space, large and strong light like a soap bubble, huge, weak light that wobbles like a mass of jelly, and light that emerges from the surrounding environment. There are lights that move continuously inside the spheres and lights that do not move at all.

The light in each sphere cannot produce all the light by itself; other spheres act as an environment that creates countless lights within each sphere. Each sphere becomes part of the environment that generates the light of the other spheres, and the phenomenon created by the environment is the existence of the work.

The light that is not physical light, such as the soap bubble lights and the lights that appear like masses of jelly more clearly higher up in space, do not exist materially inside the spheres; they exist only in our perception. And once the lights exist in our perception, it comes into existence.

When a person stops and stands still near a sphere, the nearest sphere shines brightly and resonates a tone, and the light spreads from that sphere to its nearest sphere. The light from that sphere continues to spread only to the nearest sphere, passing through each sphere only once and becoming a single trajectory of light. The light born from an individual person and the light born from others intersect.

This artwork, in which spheres seemingly scatter randomly, comprises resonating light that changes based on the relationship between the people in the artwork space. The work expresses the beauty of continuity itself.

Mathematically arranges spheres

More specifically, they determine the arrangement of the spheres mathematically. When drawing a line between spheres that are closest to each other, the distribution in height, the direction of the sphere, and the smoothness of the three-dimensional trajectory create a unicursal line with the same starting and ending point.

As a result, the light of the sphere that responds to a person’s presence will always pass through every sphere only once, like a single brush stroke, even though it is only spreading to the closest lamp. At the same time, it intersects with the light produced by others. The arrangement of the spheres may appear random, but it is to express the beauty of the continuity of light, created by people interacting with the lamps from any position.

Multitudes of Existence of Light

Multitudes of Color

Flowers and People – Megalith Crystal Formation (work in progress)

teamLab, 2023 (work in progress),  Interactive Digital Installation, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

Masses of various times and spaces exist at random, and the times and space of each mass connect to each other.

The flowers bud, grow and blossom before their petals begin to wither and eventually fade away. The cycle of growth and decay repeats itself in perpetuity. When people approach and move around, the flowers scatter and fade away. But when people stand still near the artwork, flowers grow and bloom more abundantly.

You can’t see the same images again

The artwork is not a pre-recorded image that plays back: a computer program continuously renders the work in real-time. The interaction between people and the installation causes continuous change in the artwork: previous visual states can never reproduce, and will never reoccur. You can’t see the picture at this moment again.

Black Waves – Megalith Crystal Formation (work in progress)

teamLab, 2023 (work in progress), Digital Installation, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

Masses of various times and spaces exist at random, and the times and space of each mass connect to each other.

All oceans are connected to each other, and so are all the waves in this world.

Classical East Asian art expresses waves using a combination of lines. These waves created by lines allow us to realize 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 feels as though each wave has a life of its own. But when the waves collapse and disappear, we realize, with a sense of fragility, that they were a part of the ocean. And that ocean is connected to all of the other oceans. In other words, all of the waves in the world are connected to each other.
The waves seem alive because life is like a rising wave. It is a miraculous phenomenon that continuously emerges from a single, continuous ocean.

Ultrasubjective Space creates lines, waves

The waves are expressed through a continuous body of countless water particles. They calculate the interactions of particles, and then the movement of water is simulated in three-dimensional space. Lines are created along the trajectories of the water particles, and drawn on the surface layer of the three-dimensional waves.

The lines are created with what teamLab refers to as Ultrasubjective Space. In contrast to space that is created through, or cut out by, lenses and perspective, Ultrasubjective Space does not fix the viewer’s viewpoint and in turn frees the body. The wall that the waves are seen on does not become a boundary between the viewer and the artwork, and the artwork space is continuous with the space of the viewer’s body.

Event Information

teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM
https://borderless.teamlab.art/ 
#teamLabBorderless
Azabudai Hills, Garden Plaza B B1F, (1-2-4 Azabudai, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Opening Early February 2024