Worlds Unbound

The Art of teamLab

Prof. Laura Lee

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781789384499
• eBook ISBN: 9781789384512
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In this lavishly illustrated volume, Laura Lee introduces the art of Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab, which has soared to global fame with its electrifying immersive and interactive installations. The first of its kind, Worlds Unbound: The Art of teamLab provides a comprehensive overview of teamLab's artistic vision and achievements from its beginnings to its twentieth anniversary in 2021, and illuminates the remarkable scope of teamLab's groundbreaking art and its fundamental contribution to the pivotal field of new media art.

This original new book, the first scholarly monograph on this popular group, unpacks the popularity and success of the digital immersive environments created worldwide by the Tokyo-based collective, teamLab, from multiple perspectives and addresses the lack of critical appreciation of their work. The book includes an extensive interview with teamLab.

teamLab launched in January 2001 with five members and now comprises more than 600 individuals in a multidisciplinary collaboration of engineers, computer graphics animators, mathematicians, graphic designers, architects, artists and computer programmers.

The digital art collective has attained international celebrity for its electrifying installations that transcend boundaries between gallery, public space and popular entertainment and, judging from press coverage, ticket sales and prolific production, it seems clear teamLab's success is only on the rise. In 2018, the collective opened the MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless, a massive technological environment in Tokyo that recorded 2.3 million visitors in its first year of operation – the world's largest annual number of visitors of any single-artist museum. The same year saw numerous other high-profile immersive exhibitions, including teamLab: Massless in Helsinki, Au-delà des limites in Paris, and teamLab Planets TOKYO, a second exhibition in Tokyo.

These were quickly followed by two new museums, teamLab Borderless Shanghai in 2019 and, in 2020, teamLab SuperNature in Macao. The vast sea of selfies that have emerged from these venues index the collective's soaring global popularity.

At the same time, teamLab's works have found art market success and have been exhibited in major museums worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and they are part of the permanent collection of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and Amos Rex in Helsinki, among numerous others. This canonization of teamLab's art belies the fact that the group did not have a traditional gallery start, and in fact teamLab has always engaged in software development and corporate work, in addition to creating artworks. The collective thus boasts an enigmatic status, spanning conventional categories and defying traditional art world pedigree. In so doing it has produced a tremendously rich body of work that speaks to several overlapping issues pertinent to contemporary art while advancing a unique artistic vision.

Primary readership will include artists, art historians and visual studies scholars who are particularly interested in the most recent media art and Japanese contemporary art. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars working in Japanese art, global contemporary art, digital art, augmented reality, expanded cinema and installation art and related fields.

It will also be of more general interest to those who have visited, or hope to visit, teamLab environments worldwide.

PART I

Part I opening figure: teamLab, Life is Continuous Light – Azalea Valley, 2017, Interactive Digitized Nature, Sound: Takahashi Hideaki. © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Chapter 1 Ultrasubjective Space

“What if a visual approach different from Western spatial recognition took root and became the norm? There’d be no need for any special philosophical teaching about ‘Man is but one part of the Earth.’ If all of mankind were looking at the world in that spatial manner [of ultrasubjective space], before long the boundaries between man and his environment would stop making sense, and we might create a new kind of society and culture.”¹

Figures 1.1 and 1.2: teamLab, The Land of Peace and Bliss, 2014, Digital Work, 6 channels, 10 min 30 sec (loop), Sound: Ao Shigetake, Supervising Director: Matsuoka Seigo. © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery.

This looped narrative reimagines Japanese artistic tradition through digital animation. Notably, the work combines a focus on the pictorial surface with an insistence on the depth of the image, in effect pushing the viewer into the image while simultaneously flattening that space. Dense with Buddhist symbols, it opens with a brightly-lit white elephant walking amidst an undifferentiated azure background. A slight mist hangs in the image, which ambiguously lends it depth while also asserting its paper-like material support. And it is dotted with floating cloud formations that resemble snakelike tendrils. The framing progressively tightens on the elephant’s right eye, which opens onto a Japanese village landscape. The viewer thus enters the narrative by seemingly moving forward into the three-dimensional world of the image. Penetrating its depths, the viewer assumes a free-floating perspective, at times soaring high in the air to take in the village from an aerial view, and at other times tracking laterally across the landscape or gliding downward in front of a vaporous three-dimensional waterfall (see Universe of Water Particles). This travel within the image’s depths is set off against a coexisting visual flatness, as the work’s surface treatment echoes the Japanese ornamental technique of kirikane, which traditionally celebrated the grandeur of Buddhist images by cutting gold (or other metal) leaf into lines or small shapes and adhering them to the surface. In The Land of Peace and Bliss (2014), the gold linework similarly emphasizes planarity, flattening the three-dimensional animated objects and causing them to appear to cling to the surface of the work. This oscillating sensation of flatness and dimensionality recalls the free-floating perspective within two-dimensional representational space that is common in emaki picture scrolls and, more generally, highlights how traditional Japanese artistic idioms inform teamLab’s digital works.

The foundational concept underpinning teamLab’s art is what the collective terms “ultrasubjective space”: a guiding logic of spatial composition that joins digital technology with a mode of spatial representation common in premodern Japanese art.² Specifically, the concept of ultrasubjective space reinterprets traditional ways of depicting space by generating play between flatness and dimensionality that fosters immersion in the image as it enables the viewer to assume multiple, shifting viewpoints. This mobile and mutable positioning brings the viewer into the artwork, forging continuity and interrelationality between the viewer and the world of the image. In other words, as the viewer’s conceptual position within the work changes, this triggers the spontaneous unfolding of the visual world. For teamLab, this compositional structure interrupts viewers’ habitual relationship with images and, in turn, conventional ways of seeing and thinking, which it contrasts with premodern visuality and ancient modes of seeing through frequent visual citations of traditional Japanese art. Ultrasubjective space thus re-animates the Japanese past in the global, digital present, correlating a dynamic and embodied engagement with the image with renewed relations between oneself and the world. As both concept and approach to image composition, it forms an anchor that supports all of teamLab’s works, beginning with its early projection- and monitor-based narratives and expanding to encompass the vast installations that have more recently come to dominate the collective’s artistic output.

Flower and Corpse (2008), a looped animated narrative that is told across twelve scenes, provides an especially useful example of how flatness and depth coexist in teamLab’s works to generate a mobile, dynamic viewing experience (Figures 1.3–1.6). When the animation begins, the pictorial space is a dense, writhing surface of textured gold; however, a three-dimensional world behind this surface is soon exposed to reveal an aerial view of a traditional Japanese village, seen from behind gold clouds that hover as a surface layer in the image. This dimensional space rotates slowly at the same time that there is lateral movement, and the surface layer additionally exhibits a separate but distinct lateral motion. Both of these regions of movement in the image overlay a static, textured, canvas-like background layer; because they do so to varying degrees of opacity, this background is brought forward in irregular patches and changeably over time. These shifting relationships among the various planes generate visual instability. In certain scenes, even the gold clouds, which are typically read as a foreground layer, become alternately obscured by lines of driving rain and swirling, white plumes of mist – both of which are at other moments behind the clouds – causing this surface to recede unpredictably into the uncertain depths. Disoriented and at moments dizzied, the viewer drifts, suspended in the ambiguous space of the image. This powerful sensation of being inside the image is, moreover, clearly aligned with premodern Japanese visuality. The gold clouds and overhead view of open architectural structures are readily identifiable features of traditional Japanese art, and this association is heightened through the use of traditional instrumentation in the score, as well as in the narrative about cyclical relationships between nature and culture. Additionally, the interplay between dimensionality and flatness is duplicated in the spatial construction of the landscape, which clearly evokes the construction of space in premodern Japanese art. It is as if the viewer has entered into a traditional Japanese artwork that has come to life through animation, and soars like a bird in slow motion within the pictorial space, assuming various points of view in relation to the landscape that, over time, reveal the narrative. A later, related work, Flower and Corpse Set of 12 (2012), in which the 12 scenes of Flower and Corpse were separated and converted into a monitor-based work, clearly reflects these pictorial relationships (Figures 1.7 and 1.8).³

Figures 1.3–1.6: teamLab, Flower and Corpse, 2008, Digital Installation, Projection, 12min 28sec (loop), H: 2700mm, Sound: Shiiya Haleo (Sound Director), Ao Shigetake (Compose & Mixing & Recording), Shibuya Keiichiro (The third term music), Yamakawa Fuyuki (Khoomei), Shuri (Voice), Takeda Tomoko (Shinobue), Naito Tetsuro (Wadaiko), Koyasan Shingon Buddhism Sohonzan Kongobuji, and Koyasan Wakayama (Field REC). © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Figures 1.7 and 1.8: teamLab, Flower and Corpse Set of 12, 2012, 12 channels, Digital Work, 1 min 25 sec (loop). © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery.

As Flower and Corpse and Flower and Corpse Set of 12 suggest, unlike linear perspective, which became the dominant system for representing space in Western art beginning in the Renaissance, traditional art in Japan utilized different methods for depicting three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional picture plane. The distinction between these approaches is critical to understanding teamLab’s vision, process, and artistic intervention. Put simply, linear perspective refers to a method of representing space in which lines of projection converge at one or more imaginary points at the horizon. Based on principles of optics, it relies on a horizon line and at least one vanishing point along this line. The vanishing point is where diagonal lines in the image (known as orthogonals) appear to coincide before “vanishing” into space. Pietro Perugino’s Delivery of the Keys (c.1481–2), located in the Sistine Chapel, is an especially famous example (Figure 1.9). The checkerboard piazza is composed of lines that, although they would be parallel in three-dimensional space, are made to converge, and this creates the illusion of dimension through an optical distortion. Masolino da Panicale’s Healing of the Cripple and Raising of Tabitha (c.1425), which is frequently seen as the first work with a central vanishing point, similarly illustrates this principle of convergence: the bed and buildings from the front of the canvas all the way to the back coincide at the same spot in the far background, near the navy hat on the front surface of the center building (Figure 1.10). Because of this structure of convergence, the scale of objects depends on their location along the path toward the vanishing point, with objects that are farther away from the viewer appearing smaller.

Figure 1.9: Pietro Perugino, Delivery of the Keys, c.1481–82, fresco, Sistene Chapel, Vatican Palace, Vatican City, Rome (artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Figure 1.10: Masolino da Panicale, Healing of the Cripple and Raising of Tabitha, c.1425, Brancacci Chapel, Church of the Carmine, Florenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Interview
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back cover