Nagai Botanical Garden is an outdoor botanical garden in Osaka that opened in 1974. It is located inside Nagai Park that opened in 1944 as an urban park that includes facilities such as a baseball stadium. Nagai Botanical Garden stretches over an area of 240,000-sqm with a large lake in the center, and its flora change with the seasons throughout the year.
50 years since its opening, the garden is now home to many wild birds, such as Northern goshawks and owls, which are placed at the top of the food chain and thus dependent on a healthy ecosystem to exist. In the middle of the city, this man-made botanical park and its lake sustain the ecosystem together with humans, as a man-made ecosystem within the city that includes human beings.
Where are the contours of the existence of life?
Objects like stones and man-made creations maintain a stable structure on their own. 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 does not maintain an independent structure.
Life is like a vortex created in the ocean. If a vortex is taken out of the ocean and placed in a closed box, the vortex will disappear. The vortex cannot maintain a stable structure on its own; rather, it is created and sustained by water that continuously flows inwards and outwards. The vortex is an existence within the flow, and the contour of its existence is ambiguous.
The same is true of life. It consumes external matter and energy as food and discharges it, sustaining its ordered structure as the energy dissipates. Life does not exist by itself; rather, it is the environment that is continuous with it that maintains the structure of life. In other words, the contour of life’s existence is not a physical, bodily boundary, but an ambiguous one that includes the continuity with its environment. Life is not defined by physical borders. Life is continuous with its environment, an existence whose boundaries are ambiguous.
teamLab’s art project Digitized Nature explores how nature can become art. The concept of the project is that non-material digital technology can turn nature into art without harming it.
As the artworks in this exhibition are influenced by the trees and birds that live in the garden, if the wildlife disappear, the artworks will also disappear. The trees and birds cannot be separated from the ecosystem such as the garden’s forest or lake, so if the environment is not sustained, the trees and birds will cease to exist, and as a consequence, the artworks as well. The artworks’ existence is not defined by their physical surface boundaries, but is continuous and ambiguous with its surrounding environment.
The artworks transform interactively, influenced by wind, rain, as well as by the behavior of the people in it, making the environment and the people a part of the works. The people and the artworks, the trees, the forest and the lake, the ecosystem and the environment, all form a continuity without boundaries.
teamLab aims to explore an environment where human perception expands from the artwork itself to the environment.