teamLab: Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity | teamLab

Flowers are eternally repeating the process of life and death.
The flowers that bloom change daily along with the real-time seasons. As the sun rises where the artwork is located, the world of the artwork becomes brighter, and as the sun sets, it becomes darker.
The real time in which the viewer exists, the time of the city, and the time of the repeated life and death of the flowers, all of these different times intersect and overlap, while the viewer’s body, the city, and the world of the artwork remain connected. The artwork space is an overlap of different times and space.
The artwork is not a pre-recorded image that is played back: it is created by a computer program that continuously renders the artwork in real time. The artwork is continuously changing, so previous visual states can never be replicated and will never reoccur. The picture at this moment can never be seen again.

The movement of waves in water is simulated in a computer-generated three-dimensional space. The water is expressed as a continuous body after calculating the interactions of hundreds of thousands of particles. To visualize the waves, the behavior of the particles of the water was then extracted and lines were drawn in relation to the movement of the particles. The wave created in a 3-D space is then turned into an artwork in accordance with what teamLab refers to as ultrasubjective space.
In premodern Japanese painting, oceans, rivers, and other bodies of water were expressed as a series of lines. These lines give the impression of life, as though water was a living entity.  
This form of expression leads us to question why premodern people sensed life in rivers and oceans. Also, why did they behave as if they themselves were a part of nature? Perhaps something can be discovered by fusing the fixed objective world of today’s common knowledge with the subjective world of premodern people.
While viewing this artwork, if we feel a sense of life in the collection of lines—what can be called the subjective world of premodern people—then perhaps this is one aspect of objective recognition.
When viewing this artwork, as opposed to watching waves shot with a video camera, people may feel that the barrier between themselves and the waves disappears. They feel immersed in the work, perhaps even feeling life in the collection of lines, as if the waves are luring them in. Perhaps we can find a connection to the way premodern Japanese people perceived the world and consequently behaved toward the world.
If we regard ourselves as a part of nature, and consider nature not just as something to be observed, we might join premodern people in perceiving rivers and oceans as living entities. This is a way of seeing the world that lures us in and allows us to feel that there is no boundary between ourselves and nature.

As a new capital city is being built, various people make appearances and their stories unfold in parallel in this picture scroll. The landscape of the city under construction is created on a computer in three-dimensions, in a three-dimensional space. The work comes to life as our viewpoint travels around the landscape. The lines of the work are expressed as Kirigane, an artistic technique which consists of cutting gold or silver leaf into fine lines and adhering them to the surface.