By Ashlea Halpern
Immersive art experiences are a dime a dozen these days, but when they’re done well, they’re exceptional. teamLab Borderless: MORI Building Digital Art Museum puts an atmospheric twist on a genre that’s become a social media cliche. International art collective teamLab, a tech-centric multidisciplinary pioneer since 2001, established its new permanent home in the vanguard mixed-use development Azabudai Hills in Tokyo in February. Conceptualized and executed by a team of artists, architects, CG animators, engineers, programmers, and mathematicians, they describe Borderless as a “group of artworks that form one continuous, borderless world”—shape shifting from room to room and moment to moment, interacting and reacting to one another and to spectators. One aim of the new space, says teamLab member Sakurako Naka, is to encourage visitors to consider how viewing life through the two-dimensional lens of a smartphone changes what they see and how they perceive the three-dimensional world around them (though plenty of museum goers wander through phones in hand). One look around and you can see why. In the breathtaking installation Universe of Water Particles on a Rock where People Gather a simulated waterfall cascades down the walls and across the floor, calibrating its flow and intensity based on how people move through the gallery. In the ephemeral Bubble Universe / Microcosmoses flickering spheres of light hung at varying heights react to the humans nearest them, creating a hypnotic ripple effect that can never be replicated. Sketch Ocean in particular, is a hit with the museum’s youngest visitors, who can color in a drawing of a favorite marine animal and then watch the scanned creation come to life in a giant virtual aquarium. The futurism of it all tracks with the broader creative vision for Azabudai, too, which houses more than 150 shops, Michelin-caliber restaurants, a gourmet food market, and the first Janu Tokyo, a (more) moderately priced spinoff property from Aman Resorts.
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