Sydney Contemporary 2022 | teamLab

This work is both somewhere in time and here and now.

The world of the artwork changes with the real time of its location. Morning arrives in the artwork with the sunrise in the real world, and when the sun sets, evening begins. If it rains in the real world of the work’s location, it rains in the world of the artwork, and the flora that grow in the artwork change every day with each passing season.
The people’s lives also change continuously depending on the time of day and weather of the real world, and the festivals and events that are celebrated change with the seasons. Various stories take place every day, and the lives of people continue eternally.

The actions of viewers influence the world of the artwork. The people in the artwork respond when a viewer touches them, but if the interaction is limited, they return to their daily lives.
If the interaction is continuous, however, fights break out amongst the people in the artwork that are near to each other, leading to deaths. The fighting spreads throughout the city, which becomes engulfed in flames that last for over a year. As the city burns to the ground, the people in the artwork eventually die out.

In the ruined city where not a single person remains, the seasons still pass and the sun rises and sets with the time of the real world. After a few months, new flora begin to grow in the burnt ruins of the city.
The flora grow, bloom, and scatter repeatedly, changing daily with the real passage of time. The flowers and plants grow deeply over the course of a long period, and the flowers change throughout every year, continuing in perpetuity.

Once the world of this artwork begins to burn, the world from before can never be returned to.
The people who interact with the artwork cause this outcome.

A year’s worth of seasonal flowers bloom over the course of an hour, continuously scattering and changing.

Flowers are born, bloom, then in the course of time, they wither and die. The flowers are eternally repeating the process of life and death. When people move in front of the artwork, the flowers scatter all at once. But when people stand still, flowers bloom and grow more abundantly.

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.