Mori Building Digital Art Museum to be the Next Tourist Spot in Tokyo

-“MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless” will present a borderless world that visitors can explore freely without following routes-

I was invited by a friend to join her in visiting the newest museum in Japan during my holiday. It was indeed a remarkable experience as I am looking a new tourist destination to check for my research. The museum is called “MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless”. Claimed as the unprecedented digital art museum, the all-new museum concept is a collaborative initiative between Mori Building, a noted supporter of culture and art, and teamLab, an interdisciplinary creative group that utilizes the digital technologies to express art. ​

The museum will be officially opened on June 21^st 2018 at Palette Town, Odaiba, Tokyo. Featuring 520 computers and 470 projectors, Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab is sponsored by Epson, who supplies the projection equipment. Admission costs ¥3,200 for adults and ¥1,000 for children (up to junior high school age). Opening hours are from 11am to 7pm from Mondays to Thursdays, 11am to 9pm on Fridays, 10am to 9pm on Saturdays, and 10am to 7pm on Sundays. While family-friendly, the opening hours suggest that target visitors include young couples out on dates in the bay area.

The five zones of Mori Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless:

1. Borderless World

Awestruck is what I can say when I enter this part of the museum. The colors usage is terrific, like your eyes are completely spoiled with all of the colors from the artworks in display. Visitors might even get lost in the room as the projections of flowers are literally everywhere. They are moving, changing scenes, just like you’re in different dimension. According to teamLab, in this zone they want people to understand and  to recognize the world through their bodies, to move freely and to form connections and relationships with others. Everyone’s body has its own sense of time and in their mind, the boundaries between different thoughts are ambiguous, causing them to influence and sometimes intermingle with each other.

Untitled, Waterfall and Takihana 

The artworks in this zone move out of the rooms freely, form connections and relationships with people, communicate with other works, influence and sometimes intermingle with each other, and have the same concept of time as the human body. Some of the artworks besides the main art called Untitled above is Black Waves, Graffiti Flowers Bomb, The Way of the Sea, Light Vortex, and Memory of Topography. Only in this zone, there are around 40 digital artworks that can be enjoyed.

Light Vortex

The Memory of Topography in Spring

The Memory of Topography in Spring

 The Way of the Sea

I understand why people can lose themselves in this artwork world. The borderless works transform according to the presence of people, and as we immerse and meld ourselves into this unified world, we experience continuity among people, as well as a new relationship that transcends the boundaries between people and the world.

2. teamLab Athletic Forest

teamLab Athletics Forest is a new “creative physical space” that trains spatial recognition ability by promoting the growth of the hippocampus of the brain. It is based on the concept of understanding the world through the body and thinking of the world three-dimensionally. In a complex, physically challenging, three-dimensional space, your body will be immersed in an interactive world.

This zone includes interactive sporty artworks such as Multi Jumping Universe, Aerial Climbing through a Flock of Colored Birds, Graffiti Nature, Inverted Globe, Three-dimensional Light Bouldering, and Weightless Forest of Resonating Life.

Weightless Forest of Resonating Life

Aerial Climbing through a Flock of Colored Birds

 Three-dimensional Light Bouldering

Graffiti Nature

Multi Jumping Universe

 3. Future Park

Learn and Play! Future Park is an educational project and an experimental field for co-creation (collaborative creation). When I entered this zone many kids were playing with the Sketch Aquarium artwork. They can tap to the walls that contain the moving fish and other sea creatures. When they tap the moving picture, it will move further, hide, or burst into bubbles. It does resembles an aquarium but in digital form. Besides the Sketch Aquarium, this zone also contains Sliding through the Fruit Field, A Table Where Little People Live, and A Musical Wall Where Little People Live.

Sketch Aquarium

Sliding through the Fruit Field

 A Table Where Little People Live

 A Musical Wall Where Little People Live

4. Forest of Lamps

When a person stands still close to a lamp, it will shine brightly and emit a color that resonates out. The light of this lamp becomes the starting point, and it spreads to the two nearest lamps. The light from the two nearest lamps transmits the same color to other lamps, one after another, spreading out continuously. The light transmitted from the lamp always resonates out as a bright light once, passing to close lamps until all lamps have shone brightly once and then returns to the first lamp. The light of the lamp in response to human interaction, divides in two, becomes one optical line through all lamps respectively, finally, meeting at the first lamp that became the starting point.

Forest of Resonating Lamps

5. EN TEA HOUSE

In this zone, the museum provide a cafe house with many tables that enable the visitor to enjoy drinking delicious tea with a flower inside the teacup digitally. There are various prices for each glass of tea flavors with various taste. Flowers will bloom infinitely as long as there is tea in the guest’s glass. The tea in the bowl becomes an infinite world in which the flowers continue to bloom.

This is a brand new, never-before-seen world from both Mori Building and teamLab that lets visitors create new experiences together with other visitors and explore a new world made of borderless art. Borderless installations transcend the room and move down corridors, communicate with other installations, and sometimes blend with them. These installations have no borders with the other installations, there are no boundaries between the artworks and people. People are fully immersed in the world and the borders between visitors cease to exist.

With this various zones and attraction that visitors can enjoy, Mori Building and teamLab wish for their unique digital art museum to expand cultural interactions in Tokyo and enhance the city’s magnetism as the metropolis approaches the Olympic in 2020 and beyond.

Photos by: Eric Valdenaire
Thanks to: teamLab PR team,  Mori Building Management and Stella Lee
teamLab: ​ https://www.teamlab.art/
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twitter: ​ https://twitter.com/teamLab_net
YouTube: ​ https://www.youtube.com/c/teamLabART