What Can Art Become in the Information Age? His Answer: Manufacture Dreams | 100 People With Ideas

At Mindpark, the creative conference that TOPYS and Yingtou Zhidi staged together during Shenzhen Design Week, teamLab's founder gave QDaily an exclusive interview.

The children who are not allowed to run or scream in front of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa can finally break every rule a museum has, as loudly as they like.

In one hall of teamLab Gallery Matama Beach, on Japan's Kunisaki Peninsula, they can wander a dark room however they please. Flowers native to the peninsula start as buds and open slowly across the floor and the walls; when a child reaches out to touch them or runs past, the petals scatter from their receptacles. The pink of cherry blossom, the gold of rapeseed flower and the colors of other blooms cross and mix, and to a rushing sound that imitates falling meteors they form a scene of extraordinary brilliance, which then returns to darkness and begins the next round of flowering.

"The moment the flowers fall is designed to be beautiful. People even end up grateful to the children running through the hall, because their running is what brings out a scene like that," says Toshiyuki Inoko, founder and CEO of the Japanese new-media art collective teamLab.

In front of this teamLab interactive installation, "Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together," people are no longer onlookers. They can drop the studied solemnity of standing before a Mona Lisa and move around as freely as children, running their fingertips over walls covered in flowers — and in doing so they become part of the work.

The floral patterns thrown onto the walls and the floor are not a pre-made film played over and over. They change in real time according to what each visitor does: watching from a distance, touching a flower, treading on one. That randomness makes every instant unrepeatable. Miss it and you will never see it again.

In this space, where the life cycle of the flowers plays on without end, Inoko keeps catching odd little scenes.

During the show at Pace Gallery in New York, the installation once "broke down" without warning: every bright flower withered at once and the wall went black. The crowd packed into the room stood silent in the dark for a few seconds, then began talking to one another:

"Is it because there are too many of us?"

"Maybe I'll go and see another room and come back later."

……

After about a third of the visitors left of their own accord, flowers began to grow again, slowly, out of the quiet corners.

At another exhibition, one of Inoko's staff finished installing the work, was so worn out that he lay down on the gallery floor and fell asleep. He lay there quietly, without moving, and by the time anyone noticed him his body was covered in flowers. "Those flowers bloomed with unusual force — more beautiful than anything we had seen before," Inoko recalls.

"But if he had lain down and slept like that in front of the Mona Lisa, security would certainly have thrown him out," he adds.

The piece, an immersive interactive installation, was shown for the first time at the Kunisaki Peninsula Art Festival in October 2014 and was a great success. Visitors reached for words like "beautiful" and "dreamlike"; some said they had not been so moved in years. When the festival ended, the installation stayed on as a permanent exhibit at teamLab Gallery Matama Beach on the peninsula.

When the work reached Pace Gallery in New York, Western audiences responded much the same way. They said they had "never seen anything so creative in the United States," that it was "very special," because "you have to take part in the work to find out what happens next."

The sense of participation that comes from blurring the line between work and viewer; the unknown effects thrown up by the random movements of each person; and the bond — sensory, sometimes emotional — that forms in the end between person and work, and between person and person: after this installation, all of it turned up again and again in teamLab's other work.

"Forest of Resonating Lamps" is an installation of several thousand lamps. Walk up to one of them and its color and its sound change; like a pebble dropped into a still pool, the change travels outward ring by ring, and the lamps around it switch, one after another, to the same color and the same sound. When a similar ripple starts at the far end of the hall, it means someone else is in the space.

teamLab has moved a similar experience into more open ground. As people walk the path at Shimogamo Shrine, the trees on either side change the color of their light and give off a distinct tone when a visitor or an animal comes near. The change spreads from tree to tree, and when people see it arriving from another part of the wood, they become more alert than usual to the other living things sharing the space.

Next to conventional artworks, these installations, built by digital means, seem barely credible — and carry a faint air of showing off.

"teamLab is a company that makes digital products. It is made up of specialists from many different fields: programmers, robotics engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, architects, web designers and more." Whenever he introduces his team in public, Inoko reels off this long list of technically trained members.

That mixture is the key to how Inoko has led teamLab to the installations described above. The works differ, but the process behind each project is much the same. Before production starts, the team fixes on a rough goal; then a project team of specialists from different fields is assembled according to what the project needs; and the final form of the installation is settled gradually as the work goes on, according to what the technology can do.

To build their best-known piece, "Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together," the engineers had to keep calculating sensor positions on computers so that the flowers would change in response to a viewer's presence, then run up to the roof of the office building to simulate the effect and debug it further.

While they were refining that sensing function, Inoko had another idea: he wanted people standing in front of the projected flowers to see themselves inside the image, and to feel they were standing in a sea of flowers. So the design team bonded the projection screen to a special mirror film. In the end, when someone stood in front of the screen, their reflection in the mirror overlapped the projected picture, and the line between person and work blurred further still.

The heavy technology behind these installations, together with Inoko's steady supply of design ideas and artistic notions, for a while made teamLab hard to place for the art venues it wanted to enter.

Marc Glimcher, chairman of Pace Gallery, an unusually adventurous New York gallery, says that when he first saw their work around 2012 his reaction was: "this isn't art." Much as Andy Warhol did in his day by painting 32 cans of Campbell's soup, or Damien Hirst by putting a tiger shark specimen in a tank, teamLab's work made the art world uncomfortable.

So in 2014, when Pace Gallery invited teamLab to bring six installations to New York for a solo show, Inoko says he was "a little nervous." But on opening day far more people came than expected, and by the time the show closed, total attendance was the highest of any summer exhibition in Pace Gallery's history to that point.

Peter Boris, executive vice president of Pace Gallery, holds that "a gallery is a laboratory," and that teamLab's unusual work "throws out the most fundamental question in making art — what is art, and what can art become in the information age." Whatever the answer, the first experiment teamLab and Pace Gallery ran together in New York was plainly a large success.

Inoko's delight was caught on camera. He laughed and said, "I didn't expect this much attention." Then his face turned serious and he looked into the lens, half to himself: "This is only a beginning. We can survive only if we get more attention like this."

The "survival" he meant was not teamLab the company but the art it makes. In the ten-odd years since teamLab was formally founded in 2001, Inoko had led the team on art projects the whole time. "But art never made money. Back then we didn't know how to make money from it, and we didn't know where to exhibit the work we made, so we had to earn our money from something outside art," he recalled in the interview with QDaily.

teamLab has now grown past 400 people. More than half of them work on the advertising business, and only about a quarter are devoted to developing art projects. Even so, Inoko now sees the road ahead for teamLab's art more clearly than he once did: "Our ultimate painting tool will be light. The canvas can be anything at all. We want to turn that into a new kind of art."

Light has no mass and no weight. It can throw different patterns onto any material as a backdrop without damaging it. At music festivals it becomes beams that change color at will and take different shapes in the air; go one level higher, pair the beams with sound and sensors, and they turn into strings — reach out and touch one, and it sounds the matching note.

At theme parks and other tourist sites, with a huge curtain of water shot up from a pool as the backdrop, light can throw human and animal figures onto it and act out a historical story full of movement.

And at a Tokyo restaurant we wrote about not long ago, with the tables, the tableware and the walls as the backdrop, the lighting turns into carp, cherry blossom, waterfalls, forests and other natural things, matched to the dishes and the music, to give diners a more distinctive meal.

As it has built up more and more technical experience, this "new art" Inoko talks about has created a healthier model for the whole team: take the digital technology developed while making art, apply it to different commercial projects, then put the money that comes back into new art projects, so that the team's technology and its art advance together.

None of that, though, is the final aim. What Inoko says he really wants is to "break people's fixed habits of thought through technology" and to "shape people's values through art," because "small changes in people's values will bring huge changes to society."

After he sat the exams in Tokushima City and got into the University of Tokyo, Inoko slowly adapted to life in Tokyo and began to take on new values. In that orderly metropolis he came to believe: "Peace is born of punishment under the law. First restriction, then order, and only where there is order is there peace."

Every summer he went home to Tokushima, and above all when the city held its yearly Bon dance festival, the Tokushima Awa Odori, that belief took a knock. Countless dance troupes came out onto the streets in their own costumes, playing their own music, dancing their own steps. "It should have been a complete mess, but as a whole it was extraordinarily harmonious."

"I realized that peace in the past — with no order to restrain it — may well have been harmonious in itself, and that these primal dances hint at a new kind of peace," Inoko says.

From that he wanted to use interactive art installations to change, slowly, how people see other people and the world. Just as teamLab works hard to erase the lines between individuals inside an art space, Inoko wants the ideas inside those installations to reach out, in the end, into the real world.

In the interview he said: "Modern people think about boundaries too much. They set too much store by the boundary between their own body and the world, and the boundary between the world and other people. We want to break these boundaries down and make people see that they are part of the world."

With interactive installations, Inoko hopes first to change how people see the others sharing the same art space: "In the traditional way of looking at art, you see other people only as obstacles. If there happens to be no one beside you while you look at a work, you feel lucky."

In teamLab's interactive installations, the arrival of a person changes the work itself, and through design that change can be made beautiful. "If a person's arrival can make that change beautiful, then that person's existence becomes beautiful too," Inoko explains.

He has one bold idea: to extend teamLab's digital art across a whole city, so that the effects of the light-and-sound installations are not bound by enclosed spaces but reach every corner of it. "In a city, there are often people around us whose presence we can't stand. But if we could wrap the whole city in teamLab's digital art, then people's presence might come to be seen as a good thing."

He says: "I hope our work can push this society to change, even a little. So what is it that I want in the end? I want a new society."

Cover image, in-text images and videos all from teamLab