teamLab: Flutter of Butterflies Beyond Borders | teamLab

When no one is in the Butterfly House space, it is completely dark and nothing exists. When people enter the Butterfly House space, butterflies emerge from their bodies, and flutter from their feet to the floor. If people touch the butterflies they scatter.
The butterflies fly into the displays or out of the space, transcend the boundaries of other works, and fly into the other artworks. Then, when they enter another space they continue as a new artwork. The butterflies fly seamlessly between other works, blurring the boundaries between them.In the Borderless World, the butterflies are all created solely by the presence of people in the Butterfly House. If the number of butterflies that die when people touch them is more than the number people create, this artwork will cease to exist.When this artwork disappears, butterflies no longer enter the other spaces, and the artworks of butterflies in each space will no longer appear.

The seasons co-exist and change gradually across the installation space.
Flowers blossom according to the seasons, and the places where they grow gradually change.

The flowers bud, grow, and blossom before they begin to wither and their petals eventually scatter, repeating the cycle of life and death in perpetuity. If a person stays still, the flowers surrounding them grow and bloom more abundantly than usual, but if people touch or step on the flowers, they shed their petals, wither, and die all at once. Sometimes the flowers cross the boundaries of other works and bloom in other spaces, but scatter or die due to the influence of other works.

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. 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 rule 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.