Many rediscovered and reconnected with nature during the pandemic. Others rediscovered the value of real, in-person interactions after months of seeing their loved ones through screens. Yet even so, technology and the digital realm are not antithetical to the human experience, nor do they anesthetize our senses. Tech-driven art experiences can also function as tools to train, enhance and expand our perception and be collective, inspiring shared wonder. Tokyo’s teamLab Borderless: Mori Building Digital Art Museum is proof.
People with serious backgrounds in the arts or art history are often highly skeptical about immersive digital art. Installations may be designed to prioritize entertainment, thereby risking overshadowing artistry and meaning. But the works in teamLab Borderless’ permanent space in the Mori Building, part of the newly developed luxury real estate complex of Azabudai Hills, force us to reconsider our misconceptions and prejudices about what is and isn’t art.
The artist collective from which teamLab Borderless takes its name was formed in 2001, and early on, it was creating visionary and engaging immersive experiences, working at the intersection of art and digital technology, blending science and interactive experiences. What started as a group of friends active in different disciplines has since become one of the most famous artist groups, with two dedicated museums (teamLab Planets is located in the Japanese city of Toyosu) and exhibitions all around the globe. Additionally, teamLab has installations in Shanghai, Beijing and, most recently, Abu Dhabi. The collective’s art now also circulates in the art market, represented as it is by mega gallery Pace, which recently hosted an exhibition of their work in Chelsea. Last year, some 2.4 million people paid approximately $25 each to experience teamLab’s Planets exhibition in Tokyo, with a total of ticket revenues which can pair the Met or the Tate.
But back to Tokyo. Here, any sense of reality is suspended once one enters the exhibition space. This dynamic environment invites you to wander and abandon yourself to overexposure in a multi-sensory world that activates your senses and, more importantly, your connected imagination. An initial claustrophobic feeling gives way to a sensation of potentially infinite expansion that matches our sensorial capacities. There’s no guiding pathway, and the freedom of exploring a fluid visual narrative without a beginning or end allows one to progressively abandon any rational attempt to decode the experience. Conceived as a museum without maps, teamLab Borderless’ exhibition spaces float and move from room to room, with narratives that intermingle and interact.
Interactivity is an important part of this experience, as the visitor’s movements, their presence and shadows, alter what they perceive. At one point, it becomes easy to question if immersive art is more about being on a stage, part of a hyper-theatrical experience without any script. The endless creative process of mythopoiesis that results from it immerses visitors in various symbologies and visual stories drawn from different cultures and traditions, and the highly mediated experience produces a profoundly interactive reawakening of a child‘s naïveté and desire for discovery. More importantly, throughout this journey, everyone becomes a creator: people take pictures and video, moving in a co-creation space where they are both spectators and actors. The Instagram-friendliness is artful in its invitation: everyone can contribute creatively to the shared experience of the art in the space.
There’s even something ritualistic in this immersion, where visitors are invited into a collective ritual of initiation (or re-initiation) that allows them to rediscover wonder and magic. At the same time, the dense, immersive art experience at teamLab Borderless transcends cultural boundaries and differences, acting on a prelinguistic level, which affords access to a different type of universality. In the space, people of many languages, ages and cultures are all caught up in this experience that stirs the imagination by communicating through archetypes and symbols.
Here, everything looks incredible, more beautiful and more visually intense than in real life. If the role of art is to activate certain faculties, teamLab has succeeded here by providing an immersive symbolic experience that encourages full engagement with expressions of our shared humanity and transcends cultural specificity, tapping into a collective unconscious of archetypes and revealing universal connections—something only the best art can do.
