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Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – Dark

teamLab, 2015, Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi
メイン画像

Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – Dark

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

This artwork is in continuous change, over a period of one hour a seasonal year of flowers blossoms and scatters.


The flowers bud, grow, and blossom before their petals begin to wither, and eventually fade away. The cycle of growth and decay repeats itself in perpetuity. The flowers are interactive, depending on the proximity of the viewer to the work, or if the viewer touches the flowers, the flowers simultaneously come to life, or 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: 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. This experience of nature caused teamLab to wonder how many of these flowers were planted by people and how many were native to the environment. It is 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 that 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.

CONCEPT

Ultrasubjective SpaceBorderless WorldRelationships Among People
Images for media

RELATED EXHIBITIONS

展示画像

TERMINÉE

Moving Light, Roving Sight

2015.1.22(Thu) - 2.18(Wed)

Ikkan Art Gallery, Singapore

Nouvelles

Featured on Public Art Monthly art magazine, Mar 9, 2015

ART & TECHNOLOGY #4: teamLab

At a conference last year at the Mori Art Museum on the subject of internationalism in contemporary art, scholar Michio Hayashi theorized that the popular perception of “Japanese-ness” in the West was cemented in the 1980s by triangulating “kitsch hybridity,” “primordial nature” and “technological sophistication.” 1) Today, popular (especially commercially) contemporary art from East Asia can largely be placed somewhere inside that triangle. Recent exhibitions in Europe and the United States featuring Asian artists certainly fit the triangulation formula, exhibiting themes of technological futures.
1) Ryan Wong “Kitsch, Myth, and Technology: Japanese Art in the West” 『Hyperallergic』 2014. 8. 5teamLab has become quite a prominent group in both the East and the West, via the technological sophistication and the presentation of works that condense characteristics associated with contemporary art in Asia. Presented in Chelsea at the “Duality of Existence” exhibition last year, Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as Well – Light in Dark (2014) was one such example. The seven-projector, seven-screen digital animation installation tailed the swerving flight of a succession of crows that left floral trails in their wake. Despite the colorful splashes, the panel screens presented a spectacle without story, a fantastic display of prismatic fireworks without emotional or narrative engagement. Animated with elements of epic films yet dense with a kitsch undertone, teamLab continues to put forth some of the most original contemporary art in recent years.
The Revolutionary Warping of an Analogue Motif
Setting sail on the tradition of 17th-century Japanese art and contemporary forms of anime, teamLab navigates the confluence of art, technology and design. Founded by Toshiyuki Inoko and a group of his university friends in 2001, teamLab works as a collective creative force to celebrate the vitality of nature and strive to expand our understanding of human perception. It is an interdisciplinary creative group that brings together professionals from various fields in the information age: artists, editors, programmers, engineers, mathematicians, architects, web and print graphic designers, and CG animators. They attempt to achieve a balance between technology, art, commerce and creativity, working within a broad creative range that encompasses animation, sound, performance, the Internet, fashion, design and even medical science.
An even higher superlative of technological sophistication is found in their 12-panel digital screen installation Flower and Corpse Glitch Set of 12 (2012). Like a parchment opening, the panels suggest a comprehensive narrative, yet there is no discernible logic of a unilateral direction of perception, be it horizontal or vertical. Each panel conveys a short chapter from what appears to be a tale of legends: dragons, samurais and beautiful mountains. Outlines and forms crumble, turning into digital grids, gold leafing assembling itself into a succession of subsequent scenes.
Traditional Japanese painting motifs in dazzlingly high-definition digital are animated, the loop clocking in just shy of two minutes. Despite the short runtime and lack of an apparent narrative, the immersive display never fails to capture an audience. Such were the reasons behind teamLab’s presentation garnering such praise at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2013, the inaugural edition following the Swiss exhibition’s acquisition of a majority stake in the Hong Kong fair.
Peace Can Be Realized Even Without Order (2013) is an interactive digital installation composed of holographic numbers. As the self-evident title states, the presentation tells the story of how despite disorder caused by external events, peace is gradually restored with time. Existing independently from the others surrounding it, holographic figures play instruments and dance, affected by the sounds coming from neighboring holograms. When a visitor steps across the threshold of the installation, the holographic figures respond by pausing their performance. As the first figure stills, the signal to ‘cease’ is relayed and spread to each other figure. After the visitor passes through the installation, the holographic figures return to playing music and dancing. It is the visitor’s entrance that causes the disruption of harmony. teamLab stated that “…the speed at which people can connect with other people has accelerated, and the influence of connections to other people has become more important…and perhaps in these unordered connections there is a way to find peace.”
Homogenizing and Transforming World is another installation in the same vein. Individual balls floating in space communicate wirelessly with each other. They change color and emit different sounds when touched by visitors or bumped by other objects. The first affected ball sends the new color information to others around it, the spread broadening until all the balls are once again the same color. We now live in a world that has ubiquitous connectivity to the Internet. Each individual is connected to other associates, and information is freely exchanged through that connection. Any single person becomes a voluntary information corridor, sending out new data that ultimately unifies the world. That world, created almost by an instantaneous transference, is what the installation by teamLab addresses.
Verification of Logic through Technique
teamLab’s interests reach beyond humanity, to nature and the great outdoors, and into outer space. Universe of Water Particles Under Satellite’s Gravity (2014) is an installation composed of a giant model of the ALOS-2 satellite, and a virtual representation of the satellite in digital space, meticulously recreated down to its gravitational mass. To prepare the installation, the group first created a simulation of absolute zero gravity and threw in an abundant supply of water. The algorithm they developed based on the simulation calculates the gravitational pull of the satellite and computes its effect on liquid, demonstrating how water would cascade toward the ALOS-2. The results are projected onto the physical model, the computer-generated water molecules interacting dynamically according to the preprogrammed algorithm. Once a particle strikes the surface of the satellite, it bounces off and orbits until it evaporates. Only 0.1% of the water particles from the actual simulation are selected and rendered, with lines drawn between the particles and satellite to delineate the paths of movement. The breathtaking waterfall is the culmination of those rendered lines. The creators compare the waterfall effect to traditional Japanese painting methods and an understanding of space as a curvilinear series of lines. The most recent aesthetic interest of teamLab is evident in Flowers and People – Dark (2015), which is neither a pre-recorded animation nor on loop, but a real-time rendering by a computer program.
Flowers grow, bud and blossom, bursting forth in full before withering and wilting away. It is a perpetual cycle of growth and decay. The installation responds to the proximity of visitors, physical interactions prompting flowers to suddenly wilt, or at times blossom with ever more colorful tones. Each person’s action directly results in in a succession of changes in the installation. Inspired by the premise that nature cannot be controlled, teamLab created a work that asks philosophical questions about what constitutes manmade behaviors in nature, and what those behaviors might say about our future. A rather cynical perspective might place teamLab’s combination of kitsch, legend and technology into the territory of Orientalism, because of the considerable temptation to hang the burden of reworking Americana or to glaze over their imagined future dystopias and epic pasts in tasteful techno-glitter. Whether cynical or indulgent, it is clear that the group has the ability to create unique art through the peaks and valleys of technology, further expanding that unknown world of possibility. Through their particular approach in their installations, teamLab reestablishes a connection to a world most visitors have lost and seek unpredictable “interactions” through perfected technologies. teamLab installations perceive art through the clear lens of Hayashi’s triangle, and for that, have been brought into the spotlight. ■ with ARTINPOST
About teamLab
The Japanese digital artist collective teamLab has made a huge splash in Asia, Europe and the United States. Their work explores new values that govern individual behaviors in the information era, while also revealing possible futures for societal development. The audience is led to explore the extremes of creativity as technology and art are combined and brought into play. teamLab fosters a collective ingenuity and reveals diverse possibilities for a new era of artistic development. The multidisciplinary group has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in Asia and abroad. In 2011, teamLab presented LIVE! at Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Taipei. Solo exhibitions include “teamLab: We are the Future” in 2012 at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, “Taichung; and teamLab and Saga Merry-go-round Exhibition” in 2014 at the Saga Prefectural Art Museum in Japan, “The Experience Machine” in 2012 at the Ikkan Art Gallery in Singapore, and “Ultra Subjective Space” in 2014 at Pace Gallery, New York.

Featured on Art Asia Pacific, Feb 11, 2015

MOVING LIGHT, ROVING SIGHT

Ikkan Art Gallery is one of the few venues in Singapore to serve up a consistently fascinating brew of video and new-media art. Ikkan’s most recent exhibition, “Moving Light, Roving Sight,” features a canny mix of contemporary Japanese artists and collectives, whose works are juxtaposed with older pieces by Western media artists. The latter includes Jenny Holzer’s iconic TRUISMS (selections from 1977–79) (2013), a digitally animated collection of over 200 clichés and aphorisms taken from advertising and media. Holzer’s exploitation of language and its intent is as fascinating as it is mind-numbing, making it a worthy accompaniment to Teppei Kaneuji’s 2009 animated piece Tower (Movie). In the video, Kaneuji’s stolid, unmoving structure excretes repetitious, banal imagery and sound, including a bouncing ball, tedious taps and rustles, and oozing gels and fumes. Like Holzer’s discourse, Kaneuji’s babel is insidious—integral to his tower’s essence, yet continuously undermining it. 

In “Moving Light,” older works like Holzer’s are compelling foils to the more recent pieces on display. The venerable technique of stop-motion photography, for example, inspires contemporary film artist Takashi Ishida. He bypasses digital shortcuts to create elegant stop-motion choreography on 16mm film, then digitizes the imagery, which adds depth and modulation to his compositions. In Burning Chair (2013), Ishida has “painted” organic patterns with chalk and water on the walls of a narrow concrete room. His claustrophobic concrete palette swims with intricate strokes of chalk and rivulets of water that unfurl, recede and fade. At Ikkan, Ishida’s fluent compositions seem otherworldly in contrast to Video Sketches 1–4 (1999) by Oliver Herring. Herring also uses stop motion, but with a studied lack of finesse. His goofy mélang

Featured on SINGAPORE ART&GALLERY GUIDE, Jan 25, 2015

Artist Talk by Toshiyuki Inoko, founder of teamLab,

As part of the Sunday Matinee programme jointly organized by Ikkan Art Gallery and Galerie Steph, Toshiyuki Inoko, founder of teamLab, will be giving an artist talk at the gallery on 25th January about their numerous interactive artworks and projects, including their latest “Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – Dark” installation exhibited in Moving Light, Roving Sight.(Excerpt from the text)

SERIES

  • Valley of Flowers and People: Lost, Immersed and Reborn
  • Flowers and People – Dark
  • Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together, for Eternity – Tokyo
  • Flowers and People - Gold and Dark
  • Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – Kunisaki Peninsula
  • Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year per Year
  • Flowers and People, 2 sets of 5 screens - Gold and Dark
  • Flowers and People in the Tokyo Sky – A Whole Year per Hour
  • Flowers and People - Tokyo, A Whole Year per Year
  • Flowers and People - Giant Lattice Mass, A Whole Year per Hour
  • Flowers and People − A Whole Year per Hour
  • Flowers and People in the Cubic Honeycomb - A Whole Year per Year
  • Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year per Hour
  • Flowers and People – Gold
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