Tripping The Light Fantastic

With its highly Instagrammable installations, the creative collective  teamLab has been shaking up the art world. Chloe Street meets the brains behind a phenomenon blurring the boundary between art and technology

- Chloe Street

Have you ever walked into a gallery and found a floating cube of LEDs programmed to shimmer in patterns resembling a fireplace? Or journeyed through a labyrinth of suspended crystals whose glittering patterns you can control via smartphone? Or drawn a fish and scanned it into a computer, only to have it appear seconds later swimming across a vast seabed projection on an adjacent wall? No? Then you probably haven’t encountered one of team Lab’s ultra-technological, interactive and synaesthetic visual, acoustic (and occasionally olfactory) experiences.

The Japanese art collective was founded in 2001 by physics, mathematics, and IT graduate Toshiyuki Inoko, who set out— with fellow University of Tokyo graduates, mainly majors in science and engineering— to “explore art through digital media. I wanted to create a place where people could collaborate and explore across the different fields of science and technology and art,” he says.

Through a clever combination of projectors, motion sensors, LEDs, and computers “hooked up to think and communicate with each other,” says Kazumasa Nonaka, a member of the group, team Lab creates large digital artworks that envelop visitors in an audio-visual experience like no other. “There are all sorts of boundaries in the physical world that can be eliminated through digital art,” says Inoko, explaining how team Lab’s installations demand the involvement of the viewer. Unlike traditional art, which in some senses is a one-way conversation, the interactive elements of team Lab creations enable the artwork itself to change in response to the viewer’s behaviour.