Spatial Dialogues | teamLab

When people approach the flowers, they scatter and die. When they approach the sand, the falling sand breaks up.The short time of the falling sand, the long time of the repeated life and death of the flowers, and the time of people's bodies - all these different times intersect and overlap.
The pictorial space of flowers drawn through Ultrasubjective Space differs from a picture plane flattened by a lens or by single-point perspective. In images or paintings produced by a lens or single-point perspective, space appears behind the picture plane; the space that opens there and the space the viewer inhabits are split, and the picture plane becomes a boundary surface. The viewpoint is fixed at a single point, and the body is lost. A picture plane formed by Ultrasubjective Space is not a boundary that separates where we are from the world of the artwork. The world of the artwork is not outside a window; it appears as a single field that is continuously connected, without boundary, to the space in which the viewer’s body exists. Moreover, any position — front, back, left, or right — can become a viewpoint, so viewpoints exist in infinite number, and the viewer regains a free body.
Not bound to a single point, the viewer moves their body and lets their gaze roam freely, continually re-composing the world of the work as it changes over time, and building the pictorial space of flowers within themselves.In that moment, the work becomes a subjective, embodied spatial art in which the viewer walks inside that pictorial space.

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.