Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year per Hour

teamLab, 2015, Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year per Hour

teamLab, 2015, Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

Over a period of one hour, seasonal flowers continuously transform as they blossom and scatter.


The flowers bud, grow, and blossom before their petals begin to wither and eventually scatter, repeating the cycle of life and death in perpetuity. If a viewer stays still at a certain distance, the flowers bloom more abundantly and come to life simultaneously, but if the viewer touches or steps on the flowers, the flowers shed their petals, wither, and die all at once.


The artwork is not a pre-recorded image that is played back: it is created by a computer program that continuously renders the work in real time. The interaction between people and the installation causes continuous change in the artwork, so previous visual states can never be replicated and will never reoccur. The picture at this moment can never be seen again.


In spring in the Kunisaki Peninsula, there are many cherry blossoms in the mountains and canola blossoms at their base. A visit to this region led teamLab to wonder how much of these flowers were planted by people and how much of them were native to the environment. It was a place of great serenity and contentment, but the expansive body of flowers is an ecosystem influenced by human intervention, and the boundary between the work of nature and the work of humans is unclear. Rather than nature and humans being in conflict, a healthy ecosystem is one that includes people. In the past, people understood that they could not grasp nature in its entirety, and that it is not possible to control nature. People lived more closely aligned to the rules of nature, which perhaps created a comfortable natural environment. We believe that these valleys hold faint traces of this premodern relationship with nature that once existed, and we hope to explore a form of human intervention based on the premise that nature cannot be controlled.