Spatial Dialogues | teamLab

When people approach the flowers, they scatter and die. When they approach the sand, the falling sand breaks up.
Since ancient times people have looked at falling sand to understand the concept of short periods of time, and they have seen the changes in the flowers that bloom to feel the passage of longer periods of time. The time of the falling sand, the repeated life and death of the flowers, and the time of people's bodies - all these different times intersect and overlap.
The space of the artwork is created with what teamLab refers to as Ultrasubjective Space. In contrast to spaces that are created through, or in other words 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 flowers 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.

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

In classical East Asian art, waves are often expressed 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.

The waves are expressed through a continuous body of countless water particles. The interactions of particles are calculated, 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.

The contours of life’s existence are not the surface boundary of the body, but something ambiguous that includes the environment that is continuous with it.
As long as people live, they dissipate energy and affect the environment, such as the flow of air.
In this artwork, the existence of a person is depicted through the energy dissipated by people into the world for as long as they live.

Being consists of the mind, the body, and the environment that is continuous with them.

Objects like stones and man-made creations so far have maintained a stable structure on their own. But life is different. Whereas a stone can continue to exist in a closed box, sealed off from the outside world, life would cease to exist.

Life is like a vortex created in the ocean. A vortex forms and exists in a flow of matter, and the boundaries of its existence are ambiguous.  

Although a vortex is steady, it is constantly moving and swelling like a powerful life-form. The vortex cannot maintain a stable structure on its own; rather, it is created and sustained by water that continuously flows inwards and outwards.

The same is true of life. It consumes external matter and energy as food and discharges it, sustaining its ordered structure as the energy dissipates. In other words, life does not exist by itself. It is the environment that is continuous with it that maintains the structure of life.

Life is a miraculous phenomenon that emerges from a flow in an open world. Like an ocean vortex, it is an existence with ambiguous boundaries in an infinite continuity.

To be alive is to be inseparable from the world, constantly dissipating energy into it.