MEDIA

COVETED EDITION

FLOATING FLOWER GARDEN

COVETED EDITION に、掲載。(Sep 8, 2015)

FLOATING FLOWER GARDEN
Besides many-many events and conferences during Maison&Objet 2015, there was a great flower installation during the Paris Design Week this year. CovetED was surprised to attend Floating Flower Garden from TeamLab, the Japanese digital technology collective. This group invites everyone on a sensorial promenade in an immersive installation with the overtones of a suspended Eden.

Have you ever opened the doors to a garden with thousands of levitating and perfumed flowers? Floating Flower Garden is an exceptional and highly poetic sensory experience.

After last season’s dreamy banquet of birds and flowering cherry branches, the Japanese techno-artists return to Villepinte with an amazing botanical fairyland. There were used 2,300 suspended flowers, with their roots anchored overhead, float in a vivid white bubble. Petals, leaves and pistils blossom in the silence of the carnal and mysterious garden. You wont believe but the flowers grow each day thanks to the technological prowess of TeamLab. They even rise when the spectator approaches, creating a dome over his head, and then descend once again. If visitors stand in a group together, the botanical chorus is amplified but the flowers remain evasive. This is a real miracle nowadays!

This 3-D metaphor takes inspiration from a zen kôan, those part-fable, part-poetic Buddhist enigmas. TeamLab’s founder Toshiyuki Inoko explains that in the 13th century, a zen priest left his meditative retreat in the mountains to teach the path of awakening. One day, he pointed to a flower in a garden: “People today see it as if they were in a dream”, he said. “The Heaven and I come from the same roots. Everything around me and myself as well are made of the same substance”.

This is the installation’s philosophy: the delicate link it weaves between visitors and the ecosystem offers a way to restore our sense of unity with Nature. All in all, the experience of a flower garden awakens through the magic of algorithm and introduces the visitor to team Lab’s ecological message. This is totally unbelievable!

COVETED EDITION
Floating Flower Garden: 花と我と同根、庭と我と一体 / Floating Flower Garden: Flowers and I are of the Same Root, the Garden and I are One