Earlier this month, Pace Art & Technology opened its “Living Digital Space and Future Parks” exhibit from the Japanese art collective teamLab. Large, interactive pieces with a variety of media fill the many rooms of the Menlo Park Pace building, allowing visitors to completely engage and immerse themselves in the art.
"Cold Life"
Many of the pieces will be shown for the first time in North America, and some for the first time internationally. Pace Art & Technology opened in Menlo Park at the beginning of this year, after previously serving as a temporary gallery space. The sprawling buildings house the main exhibit area, called the Living Digital Space and a children's space, Future Parks.
TeamLab is a Tokyo-based art collective of 400 painters, sculptors, engineers, mathematicians, electricians, and computer scientists. The group touches on a broad range of Japanese art, from traditional Japanese media and design, to current anime styles, all with the deftness of innovative technology.
"Black Waves"
Works are not only presented with visual elements, but also with original music, and in some rooms, scent. Some are touch-sensitive to viewer's hands, while others to the mere presence of a body in front of the display; yet another room reacts with sound and visualization of heat to the viewer's presence, lying dormant when undisturbed. Using an iPhone, one can control the optical elements of “Crystal Universe.”
Lying on my back, I looked up to the morphing, moving body of light in this flame creation.
Crystal Universe
With its diverse group of engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists, in addition to painters and sculptors, teamLab is able to create virtual designs modeled from very real elements of the natural world. "Universe of Water Particles" is a computer-generated 3-D waterfall, that reacts to the laws of physics in 'real time.' The work also speaks to the Japanese tradition of linear waterfalls as embodiments of life.
"Flower and Corpse Glitch Set of 12" tells the story of Yamata no Orochi, a dragon-like creature who terrorizes a village after his sacred tree is cut down. The twelve panels change scenes with a layer of computer-generated gold leaf and creators of the project left parts of 3-D graphics stripped away to reveal inner workings of the design.12 'film stories' with gold leaf 'pages'
"Flowers and People Cannot be Controlled but Live Together - A Whole Year per Hour" is a dark room covered in vibrant, fluttering floral patterns. Brush your hand across the wall and butterflies trail across the room. Stands still and roots and leaves will begin to sprout from that spot. TeamLab members remarked in the app that "the boundary between the work of nature and the work of humans is extremely vague," and that "a healthy ecosystem should include the symbiosis of humans and nature."
Over one hour, the wildlife cycles through growth; according to teamLab, the video display is "neither a pre-recorded animation nor on loop...the work is rendered in real time by a computer program."
The second building within Pace Art & Technology is Future Parks. Here, children can draw, scan, and play with their creations. "Story of Time When Gods Were Everywhere" aims to educate younger generations about the meaning of traditional symbols; as one touches the symbol on the wall, it turns into the image the symbol represents.
