Existence in the Flow Creates Vortices

teamLab, 2022, Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, Sound: teamLab

Existence in the Flow Creates Vortices

teamLab, 2022, Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, Sound: teamLab

Vortices are created behind people as they climb against the flow.

Although a vortex is steady, it is constantly moving and swelling like a powerful life-form.
Despite the existence of the vortex being maintained, the water particles that form it change from moment to moment. The vortex that is being seen now is created by completely different water from the same vortex seen a few minutes ago. The vortex, unlike a rock, cannot maintain a stable structure on its own; rather, it is created and sustained by the energy of water that continuously flows inwards and outwards.
A vortex looks like a life-form because life similarly consumes external energy and matter and discharges it, sustaining its ordered structure within that flow. Life is a miraculous vortex that emerges from a flow of energy in a continuous world.

Water is depicted as a continuum of countless water particles, and the interactions between the particles are calculated to create a three-dimensional simulation of their movement. The vortices create lines from the trails of these particles. The collection of three-dimensional lines are then cut out using what teamLab calls Ultrasubjective Space. In contrast to space that is created through, or cut out by, lenses and perspective, Ultrasubjective Space does not fix the viewer’s viewpoint and in turn frees their body. The floor and walls that the vortices are seen on do not become a boundary between the viewer and the artwork, and the artwork space becomes continuous with the space in which the viewer’s body exists.