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Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year per Year

teamLab, 2016, Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year per Year

teamLab, 2016, Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

This artwork is in a state of continuous change. Over a period of one year, a year’s worth of seasonal flowers blossoms and scatters.


Without people this installation is a dark space. When people enter the room, flowers blossom on them and begin to spread out below their feet. When the flowers come close to another person they spread in that direction and form connections.


The flowers grow, bud, and blossom before their petals begin to wither and eventually fade away. The cycle of growth and decay repeats itself in perpetuity. When the viewer is still, more flowers sprout and bloom. When the viewer moves, the flowers begin to wither, die, and fade away.


The artwork is not a pre-recorded image that is played back: it is created by a computer program that continuously renders the work in real time. The interaction between people and the installation causes continuous change in the artwork: previous visual states can never be replicated, and will never reoccur. The picture at this moment can never be seen again.


In spring in the Kunisaki Peninsula, there are many cherry blossoms in the mountains and canola blossoms at their base. This experience of nature caused teamLab to wonder how many of these flowers were planted by people and how many were native to the environment. It is a place of great serenity and contentment, but the expansive body of flowers is an ecosystem influenced by human intervention, and the boundary between the work of nature and the work of humans is unclear. Rather than nature and humans being in conflict, a healthy ecosystem is one that includes people. In the past, people understood that they could not grasp nature in its entirety, and that it is not possible to control nature. People lived more closely aligned to the rules of nature that created a comfortable natural environment. We believe that these valleys hold faint traces of this premodern relationship with nature that once existed, and we hope to explore a form of human intervention based on the premise that nature cannot be controlled.