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Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together - Transcending Boundaries, A Whole Year per Hour

teamLab, 2017, Interactive Digital Installation, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together - Transcending Boundaries, A Whole Year per Hour

teamLab, 2017, Interactive Digital Installation, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

This artwork is in continuous change, over a period of one hour a seasonal year of flowers blossoms and scatters.

Flowers are born, grow, bloom, and eventually scatter and die.The cycle of birth and death repeats itself in perpetuity. If people stay still more flowers are born, if people touch the flowers and walk around the flowers scatter all at once.

This artwork is in continuous change, neither a prerecorded animation nor on loop. The work is rendered in real time by a computer program. The interaction between the viewer and the installation causes continuous change in the artwork; previous visual states can never be replicated, and will never reoccur.

The artwork influences other works and flowers scatter due to the influence of other works.

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.