Mifuneyama Rakuen Hotel | teamLab

This artwork, in which lamps are seemingly scattered in a random manner, is composed of resonating light that changes based on the relationship between the people in the artwork space. It is a work that expresses the beauty of continuity.
When a person stands still close to a lamp, it shines brightly and emits a sound. The light spreads to the two closest lamps, which in turn similarly emit a sound, spreading their light to the lamps nearest to them. The light, now divided into two, will pass through all of the lamps in the room once, creating a single trajectory of light. The light created by your presence and light created by the presence of others, will always intersect.
Although the lamps may seem randomly scattered, they have been intentionally placed so that regardless of the light’s starting point, or even if the light spreads endlessly, a smooth trajectory of light will always be created, crossing trajectories of light created by other people. 
More specifically, the arrangement of the lamps is mathematically determined. When drawing a line between lamps that are closest to each other, the distribution in height, direction of the lamp, and the smoothness of the three-dimensional trajectory is quantified in order to create a unicursal line with the same starting and ending point.
As a result, a lamp’s light triggered by a person’s presence will, regardless of the fact that it is only spreading to the closest lamps, always pass through every lamp only once. The light will always cross the light created by others, and return to the original lamp that started its trajectory.
The arrangement of the lamps may appear random, but it is to express the beauty of the continuity of light, created by people interacting with the lamps from any position.

Pointillism is a genre of paintings that expresses the subject matter through a series of points. This interactive sculpture, however, consists of a set of points of light that are used to express three-dimensional objects. For this work, a three-dimensional interactive flame is produced by the points of light.
When people move close to the flames, the flames increase in intensity.
Flames are a phenomenon of light and heat generated by combustion, not a substance, but our sensory experience when we see a chemical reaction called combustion. People perceive the flame, a sensory experience, as if it were an object, and sometimes feel life in it.
Flames often appear to have a hierarchy of colors from their outside to the center: red on the outside, strong bright white on the inside, and dark in the center. In the case of a raw egg, the outer shell is white, the interior is transparent, and the center is yellow, but because it is a three-dimensional object, only the white shell is visible from the outside. Unlike an egg, the flame is a three-dimensional object made of light, and the strong bright white inside is still white when mixed with the red outside. Therefore, the flame, which is a three-dimensional object, appears as if it were a flat painting with a color hierarchy, no matter where you look at it.
By creating a three-dimensional flame with a collection of points of light, the three-dimensional flame sculpture moves back and forth between three and two dimensions.

Like an organic entity created from crystallized light, the work shines iridescently from its center as it moves around, merging and dividing continuously.

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.