digital art zone online catalog 2020s
All articles published by are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by , including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https:///openaccess.
Feature papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. A Feature Paper should be a substantial original Article that involves several techniques or approaches, provides an outlook for future research directions and describes possible research applications.
Editor’s Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of journals from around the world. Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularly interesting to readers, or important in the respective research area. The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting work published in the various research areas of the journal.
Safe, Autonomous, Airborne: What Will Roads Look Like In 30 Years?
In 2021, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco inaugurated the opening of its new contemporary wing with teamLab: Continuity. The immersive exhibition spanned six galleries and was fully interactive via sensors and digital projection mapping technology; flowers bloom and grow, flying crows burst into colorful chrysanthemums, and butterflies are born or killed at a moment’s touch. The digital objects dynamically interact with one another and with humans, blurring boundaries between art, participant, and technology. This article examines Continuity as a “collective interactive experience” situated within a digital ecosystem. It explores teamLab’s approach to the natural environment and its digital replication, with a focus on the relationship between humans and machines in shared exhibition spaces.
As you approach the newest special exhibition space at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, you are confronted with a gaping dark chasm (Figure 1a).1 Anticipating the vivid and mesmerizing space you have seen on social media, you walk through the doorframe and allow darkness to envelop your body. Your senses are immediately bombarded. You enter the world hidden beyond the entrance hall and simultaneously process an overwhelmingly sweet smell, a serene celestial soundscape, and a vibrant digital ecosystem of blooming cosmos flowers and orange spider mums, shimmering swarms of butterflies, and darting white crows (Figure 1b).
You shake off your disorientation and join the awestruck and gleeful people sharing this experience. The walls and floor are covered in varieties of flowers and leaves that grow, scatter, and wilt at your touch. Butterflies cheerfully navigate the environment until accidentally trampled or hit by an unsuspecting passerby (Figure 2). Crows that are caught or crash headlong into an obstacle suddenly burst and turn into a chrysanthemum (Figure 3 and Figure 4). You continue to weave around fellow visitors as you explore this digital realm. With strategically placed mirrors and shiny floor tiles, some rooms appear to recede into infinity. One area births a kaleidoscope of butterflies while another generates a murder of crows. A school of fish rushes from one side of the exhibition space to another, shaping a path according to the human bodies obstructing the floor (Figure 5). As the potential for interaction within the environment becomes clear, you begin to join others growing flowers, catching crows, and taking photographs of the digital ecosystem in which you now play a part.
La Jolla Then And Now: Girard Avenue And The Village, 1920s Vs. 2020s
Time passes and the seasons change. The chrysanthemums of autumn give way to the deep blue pansies and violas of winter, followed by the geraniums and pink cherry blossoms of spring and the golden sunflowers of summer (Figure 6, Figure 7, Figure 8 and Figure 9). Still, every visitor’s action in the space has a consequence; standing still will grow a bed of flowers, grazing a hand along the wall may kill butterflies or crows; fish divert around the sea of people grouped in the room. The environment reacts and responds to the presence of both digital and human presence unique to each moment and relies on active engagement with the space. Even when you are ready to exit the exhibition, your impact on the environment remains for the next wave of awestruck visitors while you rejoin the more “traditional” gallery spaces of the museum.
This immersive exhibition, titled teamLab: Continuity, was on display 23 July 2021 until 28 February 2022, attracting over 125, 000 visitors.2 According to teamLab, the Japanese artist collective responsible for the exhibition, Continuity was so-titled because “everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous borderless continuity of life” (Asian Art Museum Exhibitions Website 2022). People are meant to co-exist within the digital ecosystem, dissolving boundaries between one another, the artworks, and ideas of the natural environment. For this reason, the exhibition is a fruitful example of “collective interactive experience” in digital art. In this type of experience, humans share space with other humans in an environment that relies on physical presence and communal action; the existence of others inherently shapes the experience of the artworks and the themes they address. This article examines Continuity as a digital ecosystem that relies upon collective interactive experience for its realization as an immersive exhibition. It begins with an introduction to teamLab—a pioneering collective that has been instrumental in defining twenty-first century new media practice. It then offers a conceptualization of a collective interactive experience in digital art before an analysis of Continuity as a lively digital ecosystem. The article concludes with a reflection on collective interactive experience in the post-COVID-19, Instagram-oriented art experiences of the 2020s.
TeamLab was co-founded in 2001 with five members—Inoko Toshiyuki (b. 1977), Sakai Daisuke (b. 1978), Tamura Tetsuya (b. 1977), Yoshimura Joe (b. 1977), and Aoki Shunsuke (b. 1978)—each bringing specialized training in software engineering, robotics, and information technology (Lee 2022).3 The collective calls itself the “Ultratechnologist Group” working to “navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, design and the natural world” (teamLab Website 2022). Founded as both an information technology start-up and an art collective, teamLab established a commercial production wing to fund the group’s artistic projects. While one side of the company develops search engines, digital products, and office space design, the other creates video and projection-mapped artworks that apply these advanced technologies to the visual arts. Because of this, teamLab’s artistic endeavors are intrinsically tied to the commercial and financial interests of the collective in a broader media–technological milieu—a point that cannot be overlooked when situating teamLab between the commercial and institutional art worlds today.
The Great Stink, 2020s Style. Sketching A Future State: Digital…
TeamLab’s first major institutional art presence was at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2008, where the collective exhibited Flower and Corpse Animation Diorama (2008) in the Kansei—Japan Design Exhibition. Using a dozen screens positioned around the exhibition space, the artwork surrounded visitors with a twelve-scene illustrated story that utilized premodern Japanese perspective techniques (teamLab Design Exhibition Website 2008). The exposure in Paris and affinity with the Superflat movement brought teamLab to the attention of internationally renowned artist Murakami Takashi (b. 1962), who invited the collective to organize a solo exhibition at the Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Taipei.4 LIVE! (生きる！) was installed in 2011 and catapulted teamLab into the global contemporary art world. The collective grew exponentially. In 2013, teamLab participated in the Singapore Biennale. The following year, the group signed with Pace Gallery and opened their first exhibition at Miraikan in Tokyo, which attracted half a million visitors. In 2015, the collective represented Japan at the World Expo in Milan, which was closely followed by the opening of DMM.PLANETS Art by teamLab in 2016, their first large-scale immersive exhibition space. teamLab’s success of the 2010s culminated in the opening of the MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: EPSON teamLab Borderless in 2018, touted as the first-ever digital museum with 107, 000 square feet of exhibition space in Odaiba, Tokyo. The need for even more space resulted in the Odaiba location’s permanent closure in 2022 after breaking a record for the world’s most visited museum, with plans to reopen as an underground attraction in the Toranomon-Azabudai Project’s JP¥ 580 billion revitalization initiative (Steen 2022). The collective’s artworks are now in permanent collections of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and Amos Rex in Helsinki.5 Today, teamLab is home to over 750 “ultratechnologists, ” bringing together artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, architects, and designers for both its commercial and artistic wings (Mun-Delsalle 2018).
The interdisciplinary marriage of engineering, scientific research, entertainment industries, and art in teamLab’s practice also represents a growing trend toward commercially oriented immersive experiences. teamLab’s model—an artist-run company with integrated studios, Do-It-Yourself approaches, well-equipped collective workspaces, dedicated display space, and funding through ticketed experiences—lead the Research and Development Platform at Serpentine Galleries to label it as a “future art ecosystem” in 2020 (Serpentine R&D Platform 2020). Indeed, the group’s international presence plays a key role in the recent explosion of spectacular, Instagram-oriented exhibitions. In addition to pop-up and semi-permanent displays, the collective has
TeamLab’s first major institutional art presence was at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2008, where the collective exhibited Flower and Corpse Animation Diorama (2008) in the Kansei—Japan Design Exhibition. Using a dozen screens positioned around the exhibition space, the artwork surrounded visitors with a twelve-scene illustrated story that utilized premodern Japanese perspective techniques (teamLab Design Exhibition Website 2008). The exposure in Paris and affinity with the Superflat movement brought teamLab to the attention of internationally renowned artist Murakami Takashi (b. 1962), who invited the collective to organize a solo exhibition at the Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Taipei.4 LIVE! (生きる！) was installed in 2011 and catapulted teamLab into the global contemporary art world. The collective grew exponentially. In 2013, teamLab participated in the Singapore Biennale. The following year, the group signed with Pace Gallery and opened their first exhibition at Miraikan in Tokyo, which attracted half a million visitors. In 2015, the collective represented Japan at the World Expo in Milan, which was closely followed by the opening of DMM.PLANETS Art by teamLab in 2016, their first large-scale immersive exhibition space. teamLab’s success of the 2010s culminated in the opening of the MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: EPSON teamLab Borderless in 2018, touted as the first-ever digital museum with 107, 000 square feet of exhibition space in Odaiba, Tokyo. The need for even more space resulted in the Odaiba location’s permanent closure in 2022 after breaking a record for the world’s most visited museum, with plans to reopen as an underground attraction in the Toranomon-Azabudai Project’s JP¥ 580 billion revitalization initiative (Steen 2022). The collective’s artworks are now in permanent collections of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and Amos Rex in Helsinki.5 Today, teamLab is home to over 750 “ultratechnologists, ” bringing together artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, architects, and designers for both its commercial and artistic wings (Mun-Delsalle 2018).
The interdisciplinary marriage of engineering, scientific research, entertainment industries, and art in teamLab’s practice also represents a growing trend toward commercially oriented immersive experiences. teamLab’s model—an artist-run company with integrated studios, Do-It-Yourself approaches, well-equipped collective workspaces, dedicated display space, and funding through ticketed experiences—lead the Research and Development Platform at Serpentine Galleries to label it as a “future art ecosystem” in 2020 (Serpentine R&D Platform 2020). Indeed, the group’s international presence plays a key role in the recent explosion of spectacular, Instagram-oriented exhibitions. In addition to pop-up and semi-permanent displays, the collective has
