Cognitive Sculpture
2021
A sculpture that does not exist in the physical world, but in the cognitive world.
The materials are light, body, and cognition.
The sculpture is shaped by the person’s own active body and cognition, appearing and existing only in each person’s cognitive world.
Existence in the cognitive world makes the artwork come into existence.
The artwork questions perception and existence, and opens up possibilities of new existence that are different from material existence.
FEATURED WORKS
teamLab, 2021, Interactive Installation, Sound: teamLab
Countless solidified light crystals float in the air, rising, falling, and sometimes frozen in space. When people immerse themselves in the artwork, the crystals of solidified light that the people touch breaks, and the light from the crystals spreads throughout the space of the work.
When people touch the solidified light, they realize that the solidified part that they can see is a part of a continuous flow.
Life is a phenomenon that appears as a miraculously solidified, ephemeral crystal of light in a continuum of energy that has been flowing without interruption since a past whose beginning is unknown.
teamLab, 2022, Interactive Installation, Sound: teamLab
People can walk into the artwork, and even if they do so, the artwork will continue to be maintained, its existence unharmed. If a person touches the artwork, they realize that what they are looking at is ordinary water. The artwork’s existence is not independent, but is actually a unique phenomenon created by its environment.
The places where the work appears will change as the viewer moves. The work’s appearance is unique to the viewer, so someone viewing the artwork from another angle will see a different colored work appearing in a different place. In other words, the existence of the artwork being seen is created by its environment, and exists only in the viewer.
Environmental Phenomena
teamLab explores the creation of artworks based on the concept of environmental phenomena, in which the artworks do not exist independently, but are created by the environment that produces the various phenomena.
Objects like stones and man-made creations maintain a stable structure on their own. Unlike these, the existence of the artworks are dependent on their environment.
The environment produces phenomena and stabilizes their structure - these stabilized phenomena are what create the existence of the artworks.
Environmental phenomena are released from the material substances that have been responsible for maintaining structures of existence. Elements like air, water, and light that permeate our daily lives are transformed by their environment into unique phenomena that become works of art. The boundaries of their existence are ambiguous and continuous. Even if people destroy the work, the work will remain in existence as long as its environment is maintained. On the contrary, the work will disappear if the environment is not maintained.
In time, people's consciousness will expand from existence itself to the environment.
A stone can continue to exist in a closed box, sealed off from the outside world, but life cannot sustain its existence in such a box because it is created by its environment.
Life is a miraculous phenomenon that emerges from a flow in a continuous world.
teamLab, 2022, Interactive Digital Installation, Sound: teamLab
We do not perceive the world we see, we see the world we perceive.
A sphere made of accumulated rays of light.
The light radiates from the center in infinite fine rays, creating its spherical shape. The light source remains motionless, yet the countless lines emitting from it wriggle continuously.
The sphere has no surface boundary, and the perception of the boundary between the artwork and the body is ambiguous. When you try to touch the sphere, it reacts, but since it does not have a physical boundary, your hand goes into the sphere.
What is this sphere? Why do the rays of lines wriggle?
Our world is within us.
And if we perceive this sphere made of accumulated lines, the world we perceive will expand, and we may see the spheres of accumulated lines in our daily lives. As the world you perceive changes, the way you see the world goes on to change.
teamLab, 2022, Digital Installation, Sound: teamLab
A sphere made of accumulated rays of light.
The light radiates from the center in infinite fine rays, creating its spherical shape. The light source remains motionless, yet the countless lines emitting from it wriggle continuously.
The sphere has no surface boundary, and the perception of the boundary between the artwork and the body is ambiguous. When you try to touch a sphere, your hand goes into the sphere as it does not have a physical boundary.
What is this sphere? Why do the rays wriggle?
Our world is within us.
And once we recognize this sphere made of accumulated lines, our perception of the world expands, and we will begin to notice them wherever we go.
Massless Suns and Dark Spheres
teamLab, 2022, Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi
Countless spheres of light and spheres of darkness.
Each sphere of light can be clearly perceived in the space as a mass seemingly made of solidified light, however, there is no material surface boundary. The perception of the boundary between the artwork and your body is ambiguous.
When you broaden your vision, purple-blue spheres made of darkness also begin to appear, as though darkness has been solidified.
If you try to touch a sphere of light, the sphere shines brightly and the surrounding spheres respond one after the other.
Light does not solidify, and masses made entirely of light do not exist in the universe. In other words, these spheres of light only exist in your perception.
The work cannot exist on its own - its existence is a phenomenon created by its environment.The work questions the notion of existence and what it means.