Immersive Digital Art Installation in Tokyo by Teamlab
Creative Japanese collective teamLab just revealed their largest exhibition of digital art and mapping in Tokyo. Until the end of August, you’ll be able to visit 3000 square meters of virtual experiences in a structured labyrinth.
The wildly creative, 400-strong Japanese tech-art collaborative teamLab announced plans to open its first permanent exhibition space in Tokyo this summer. Called “Digital Art Museum,” (full name: “MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM teamLab Borderless”) the new 10,000 sq.m (107,639 sq. ft) gallery space will be established in the Palette Town section of Odaiba, a man-made islet in Tokyo Bay. Based on teamLab’s reputation for blockbuster immersive exhibitions, Digital Art Museum promises to draw legions of art lovers—especially those enamored by taking art selfies in dazzling environments.
Founded by mathematical engineer Toshiyuki Inoko in 2001, teamLab is comprised of artists, programmers, engineers, computer animators, mathematicians and architects who collectively ascribe to the descriptive “ultra-technologists.” As a practice, names of teamLab members are not cited in works, they have a flat organizational structure and emphasize collaboration over individual genius. They are also very particular about the spelling of their name (small ‘t,’ big “L”). Their mission is to explore how humans relate to nature in an age when much of our life is governed by technology.
teamLab tells Quartz that they’ve decided to open their own museum because they haven’t found a cultural institution solely dedicated to the thriving field of digital art. While many museums do include digital art in special exhibitions, no major art institution has a purpose-built structure with the right bandwidth and physical space to support the tech needs and big crowds of such installations. (Berlin’s similarly-named Digital Art Museum is actually an online showcase with a small, brick-and-mortar gallery in the Mitte neighborhood.) “We’ve wanted to create the exhibition that delivers the borderless artwork world, and figured we needed to establish the museum itself in order to make that happen,” explained a teamLab spokesperson in an email.
