This morning I got to visit the teamLab art installation in Palo Alto at the Pace Gallery.
teamLab (f. 2001, Tokyo, by Toshiyuki Inoko) is an interdisciplinary group of ultra-technologists whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, technology, design and the natural world. Rooted in the tradition of ancient Japanese Art and contemporary forms of anime, teamLab operates from a distinctly Japanese sense of spatial recognition, investigating human behavior in the information era and proposing innovative models for societal development. teamLab’s works are in the permanent collection of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; The Asia Society Museum, New York; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. They have been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide; in 2015, a projection work was exhibited on the façade of the Grand Palais, Paris.
It was a complete and utter delight. We wandered through the darkened rooms and experienced LED, video, projection and interactive exhibits that played with spatial relationships and story and emotion in ways I’ve never encountered before.
Some of the art was astonishing and over-the-top, and other pieces were subtly interactive in ways that made me want to stand in front of them for hours, watching graphics grow and blossom on the screens and react to my proximity. There were a lot of birth-death-rebirth themes, and nature images overlaid on naked wireframe renders which gave a new sort of depth to the artwork that was unexpected and beautiful. I found myself suddenly moved and in tears one moment, then laughing with sheer delight the next. Some of the artwork kept me rooted to the spot and some was playful and silly and ephemeral, like an interactive hop scotch game and one piece where the audience got to color in pictures, then scan them and see their own artwork become part of the larger art installation. (I drew a mermaid and got to watch her swim in a giant projected ocean full of crayon-colored fish)
If you get a chance, definitely get tickets to this and go see it — it will be open through July 1 of 2016.
