SISYU + TEAMLAB What a Loving, and Beautiful World 2011
SISYU + TEAMLAB
What a Loving, and Beautiful World 2011
interactive digital installation
Calligraphy by Sisyu, sound by Hideaki Takahashi
COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS AND PACE GALLERY
11 results
SISYU + TEAMLAB
What a Loving, and Beautiful World 2011
interactive digital installation
Calligraphy by Sisyu, sound by Hideaki Takahashi
COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS AND PACE GALLERY
CAMBRIDGE — Thanks to its many innovative research institutions and to the long-term contributions of organizations like Boston CyberArts, this city is a great place to see interactive, projection-based art.October has been especially rich for this kind of work. The second annual Illuminus festival — a spectacular laser and light show organized by Jeff Granz — was held on Lansdowne Street, as part of HUBweek, on the night of Oct. 10. A week later, Joseph Ketner of Emerson College organized “Electric Pilgrims," a group show featuring outdoor projections on building facades and TV screens set up on Channel Center Street in South Boston.Both events had to contend with the weather and were limited to one night. That’s not the case with “Parallax," Shahzia Sikander’s ravishing animated projection at Tufts University Art Gallery, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. Nor is it the case with a new show at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. Both are indoors, and ongoing.Called “What a Loving and Beautiful World," the Radcliffe show is in the new Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery in Byerly Hall. It is immersive, interactive, and genuinely entrancing.It’s by teamLab, a large consortium of artists, programmers, engineers, computer graphics animators, mathematicians, and graphic designers, formed in 2001 and based in Tokyo.There are three parts to teamLab’s display at the Radcliffe Institute (which, by the way, has an impressively ambitious art program). The biggest and most memorable is a video installation in a room you walk into, and then have a hard time leaving — it’s that engrossing.Calligraphic characters, in both Japanese and Chinese script, descend slowly from the low ceiling. Reach out toward them and they shrink away, before transforming into the thing they connote. The character for “mountains," for instance, turns into animated imagery of a mountain range; the same for snow, rain, and so on.The biggest and most interactive portion of the show surrounds visitors.The imagery, traditional in appearance (which is to say painted with brush and ink), spreads magically and seemingly spontaneously across the gallery’s three walls. Bare winter branches alternate with birds in flight, butterflies, and floating flower petals.A rainbow appears, then slanting rain, then snow — or the same, but in a different order. Dark, inky effusions contrast with a splendidly isolated moon, a sun, mountains and waves, a blue dawn, an enflamed sunset.The writing was executed by a professional calligrapher who goes by the name Sisyu. The work’s conception is attributed to her and to teamLab. The accompanying soundtrack, the kind of atmospheric but essentially flavorless music you hear while getting a back massage, is by Hideaki Takahashi.It’s hard to explain how charming and at times transporting the work is. The interactive conceit — your awareness that the imagery is responding to the willed movements of your and your fellow viewers’ arms — is tempered by a wondrous sense of words and pictures appearing and spreading in ways beyond your control.You lift your arm to make something happen, but a second later, some other image swells across the screen as a result of someone else’s actions. The whole thing feels likably democratic. Yet compositionally, the visuals never feel crowded or chaotic.As in traditional Asian art, there is a beautiful tension between emptiness and fullness, and between elements that splinter and those that cohere. Outside this main gallery are wall-mounted screens showing two more works, both featuring calligraphy by Sisyu, animated and ornamented by her teamLab colleagues. One called “Life Survives by the Power of Life" is a six-minute digital animation that begins, hypnotically, with pooling black ink marks appearing out of nowhere on a light, inchoate ground.The marks morph magically into bare branches, which are soon covered with snow, all in a slowly rotating three-dimensional space. Gradually, the snow melts and is replaced by buds, leaves, flowers, and a profusion of life — “weeds in wheels" shooting “long and lovely and lush," as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it in “Spring."The second, “Cold Life," began as a kind of peeling away of the virtual surface of the previous work, so that we see its computer graphics “bones," so to speak: wireframe models with dense abstracted data rendered in three dimensions, in a dominant palette of electric blue.The imagery in all three teamLab works feels clichéd and sentimental, while its stated themes — nature and humanity — are perhaps unhelpfully vague. But somehow, the mash-up of traditional and new, handmade and high tech, pulls you in, and you succumb to these works’ inner logic.Bring kids, if you can. They will love it.Art ReviewTEAMLAB AT RADCLIFFE: What a Loving and Beautiful WorldAt Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, Radcliffe Yard, Harvard University, through Nov. 14. 617-496-1153, www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2015-teamlab-exhibition
There’s a clear, unspoken rule enforced in most museum and gallery settings: Don’t touch the art.But currently, that’s not the case inside the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where a new exhibition is very much dependent on visitors’ touch.Titled “teamLab at Radcliffe: What a Loving and Beautiful World," the interactive exhibition features projections of Chinese and Japanese characters that represent elements from the natural world and cascade down the walls of the gallery. When activated by touch, the characters trigger images of their meanings, as well as sounds, to emerge.As they’re triggered around the space by multiple people, the images can also interact with each other, constantly creating new animated environments that cannot be repeated.TeamLab, the group from Japan that created the digital artwork, is an interdisciplinary consortium that consists of artists, programmers, engineers, animators, mathematicians, architects, and designers. Their multimedia installations have appeared around the world, rendering dreamlike, responsive environments such as a floating flower garden and a cosmos-like space filled with thousands of LEDs that give visitors the illusion of standing among stars.For the exhibition at Radcliffe, teamLab collaborated with professional calligrapher Sisyu and musician Hideaki Takahashi. It’s the inaugural show at the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, which was recently redesigned and renamed following a gift from Harvard alum Maryellie Kulukundis Johnson and her husband Rupert H. Johnson Jr.“teamLab at Radcliffe: What a Loving and Beautiful World" is free and open to the public Mondays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m., through November 14 at the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery of Byerly Hall, 8 Garden St., Radcliffe Yard, Cambridge. For more info, visitradcliffe.harvard.edu.
What’s it like to walk into a living dream, one you can control with a wave of your hand? To find out, stop by Radcliffe’s redesigned Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery in Byerly Hall, where the interactive installation “teamLab at Radcliffe: What a Loving and Beautiful World" transforms the viewer into virtual artist.Behind a black curtain, a vivid dreamscape springs to life as visitors pass their hands in front of projected Chinese and Japanese characters that cascade down the gallery’s walls and vanish into the floor.Move a hand in front of the character for butterfly and the character disappears, replaced by a burst of brilliant insects fluttering on the wall. Pass your hand over the character for lightning and the gallery explodes in jagged flashes of white.As multiple visitors move through the space, the images they trigger interact with one another, creating a unique environment every few seconds. Each image has its own acoustic signature, so viewers are also virtual composers who generate an ever-changing world of sound.The gallery has been transformed into something “entirely unpredictable" said Yukio Lippit, the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at Radcliffe and a professor of the history of art and architecture, who was instrumental in bringing the show to Harvard.Visitors, he said, will be surprised by “the degree to which they have agency in shaping this world, in interacting with it, in triggering its various mechanisms and effects to create something new."The brain behind the new design is teamLab, a Japan-based consortium of designers, engineers, architects, artists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and specialists in 3-D modeling who use technology to expand the boundaries of art and creativity. For the Radcliffe show, the group used characters by the Japanese calligrapher Sisyu that represent the natural world, and music by Hideaki Takahashi.In Cambridge last week for the gallery opening, Toshiyuki Inoko, teamLab’s founder, discussed through an interpreter the genesis of the project, his vision for the work, and the importance of having its U.S. debut at Harvard.Created in 2001 with five members, teamLab now numbers more than 400, all of whom share the belief, said Inoko, “that digital technology can expand the expressive boundaries of art."Inoko, an engineer by training, said art has been as important as science in the history and development of human perception. Taken together, the disciplines can help reconnect people to their physical surroundings and to one another, he said, adding that he worries that such connections are increasingly scarce in today’s hyper-connected digital world.“In the pre-modern world, life was based in community," said Inoko, “one understood that one’s actions were mutually interactive and consequential in profound ways. And so the interactivity of the installation is meant to evoke a kind of resonance with one another and the world, which has been lost."Bringing the installation to Radcliffe has been a good fit for teamLab, whose collaborative nature, Inoko said, resembles Radcliffe’s operating ethos, one that encourages interdisciplinary engagement among its fellows and visiting scholars.“To fully explore the potential of this realm one has to work collaboratively. The digital realm is very complex, and the boundaries that separate what I am calling creativity and technology are actually thoroughly blurred.“We come together to work out problems and think of solutions, using our combined expertise to solve problems," he continued. “And that process is very important because it leads to the generation of knowledge and small intellectual discoveries that are then folded back into the process. … So being able to showcase our work in an interdisciplinary environment such as this one is highly meaningful."Lippit agreed, adding that the installation can help show Harvard students what’s possible when various disciplines work together.“I think this offers one kind of ideal model of collaboration."
SINGAPORE – For visual arts in Singapore, 2012 will likely be remembered as the year Gillman Barracks opened, a cluster of new art galleries. But beyond this government-led opening, many other new international galleries independently also found their way to the city-state attesting to the interest in the region. Meanwhile, the quality of the exhibitions on offer also seems to go from strength to strength. Within one month this fall, Richard MacDonald, Bernar Venet, Richard Deacon, and Zadok Ben-David were all in town opening separate shows.
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"The Experience Machine" at Ikkan Art Gallery
The immersive exhibition of new media art allowed viewers the opportunity to interact with and contribute to many artworks. Of particular note was "What a Loving, and Beautiful World" by Japanese calligrapher Sisyu and teamLab an interactive animation installation where slowly falling kanji (the characters used in Japan) for words like ‘rain,’ ‘flower’ and ‘butterfly’ transform when touched by a viewer’s shadow to become the image of the word they represent while a corresponding sound is heard.
Carla Bianpoen, Contributor, Singapore | Art and Design | Thu, October 18 2012, 7:44 AMAs the technical revolution continues with ever evolving digital innovation, it seems that video art and digital art, which have been gradually being accepted as valid mediums of artistic expression, are just the tip of the iceberg.This is being made clear at the exhibition of new media art from the past 13 years by nine international artists at Ikkan Gallery Singapore, showcased under the title “The Experience Machine" until Oct. 27.When visiting the show at Ikkan Gallery, Tanjong Pagar recently, I was amazed and overwhelmed by the surreal landscape that I was allowed to co-create in, in what I found was the most inventive and fascinating work made by the Tokyo-based teamLab with chief executive officer Inoko Toshiyuki (b. 1977) . “What a Loving and beautiful world" was invented by teamLab, whose hundreds of interdisciplinary members from various countries have cooperated with Sisyu, a calligrapher who explored the power of emotional and visual evocation of Japanese ideograms, with accompanying music from Hideaki Takahashi.While interactive work has been around for some time, this installation work differs in that it literally transports the viewer into a self-created natural world, rendering the feeling of being a creator of sorts.
In a space specially constructed for the purpose, everything is initially black, as was the Earth before its creation, until kanji signs randomly fall from the four walls through the touch or shadow of our hands. At the touch of the sign for the flower, the entire space is filled with flowers. If the sign of bird comes down together with that for a tree and is touched simultaneously, the signs will erupt with a flight of birds that automatically occupy the branches of the emerging trees. When touching the character for wind, all things on the screen will be swept away including the character, and when one happens to touch the character for the butterfly and flower at the same time, the butterfly automatically seeks the flower. The characters are programmed with an intelligence of their own, says gallery owner Ikkan Sanada, who moved from New York to Singapore less than a year ago.As I stood in the dark space before the falling kanji signs in a dramatic night landscape illuminated by the moon, it was as if I was experiencing the very story of creation as told in the Book of Genesis. The difference of course was that the images evoked by the touch or shadow of the human hand were ephemeral, disappearing immediately as we touched another sign, perhaps hinting at the transient nature, the impermanence of things. In the same sense, requiring a human hand to evoke the images could also be understood as the role humans must play in the preservation of the natural environment.The work was awarded the Architecture, Art & Culture Award at the international contest ReVolution during Laval Virtual, Europe’s largest virtual reality salon in spring 2012.Another piece of work by teamLab in the show visualized their suggestion that Asian art appreciation differs from that of Western art. In “Flower and Corpse Glitch" animation, turning a 2D Japanese painting into a computer generated 3D virtual space, teamLab suggests that ancient Japanese visualized a picture from inside, blurring the subjective and the objective, without a focal point, whereas paint in the West considers the rules of perspective, geometry and objectification.
Similarly, the absence of a focal point is also seen in the photographic view of The Last Judgment in Cyberspace by the Chinese artist Miau Xiaochun, where the artist in fact enters the famous painting by Michelangelo, re-inventing it by transforming the 2-D into computer-generated digital scenes with depth and volume while eliminating the focal point and allowing the viewer to see the scene from various angles. He once said that it was his way of proposing equality. The repeated use of the same model “automatically abandons the distinctions between high and low, left and right, good and evil, honorable and humble, east and west, ancient and modern."Other works in the show include Enclose by Philippine artist Bea Camacho, Home Movie by Jim Campbell, ASCII History of Moving Images by the Ljubljana, based artist VukCosic, Dust Storm by John Gerrard from Ireland, Vermeer study: Looking Back (mirror) by the Japanese artist Morimura Yasumasa, Something is boiling by Ben Rubin from the US and Endless victory by John F. Simon Jr, US.
Transition has been on my mind of late. Maybe that’s why I gravitated towards the insight noted in The Experience Machine’s catalogue essay on the industrial age making way for the “electronic era", allowing for renewed “ways of seeing and experiencing our world".How then does our current electronic era influence art? More than ever, artists are using technological advances to alter and challenge their practices and processes, giving rise to ‘New Media Art’, which comprises “constantly evolving hybrid technological art forms such as video art, digital art, interactive installation and customized software art". The semantics of art then comes into question. Can the programmed digital software John F. Simon Jr. used to create what I heard some visitors call a “Microsoft screensaver" be called art? Ambivalence about popular acceptance of such unfamiliar art forms has clearly not deterred co-curator and owner of Ikkan Art International, Ikkan Sanada, from presenting a plethora of unconventional, tech-savvy and wonderfully bizarre works that the local art scene has probably not yet witnessed. After all, what is transition without the slight discomfiture and strange newness of change?With change comes a reconfiguration of habits and customs. Technology allows and promotes the manipulation and reconstruction of our visual, social and perceptive norms, engendering new sights and experiences that challenge the beliefs we have become used to. Iconoclastic and irreverent, Morimura Yasumasa’s contemporary takes on the historically famed Vermeer painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring, challenge art-historical and social ideas regarding the male gaze. By reconstructing his Japanese, male identity into that of a Western, female figure, Morimura subverts the conventional notions associated with the invasive, voyeuristic male gaze, confounding the viewer and prompting him to look beyond the superficiality of representation. He employs more physical reconstruction and metamorphosis than technological (although his use of video alone in the appropriation of Vermeer inserts a wholly new artistic dimension and comparison): notorious for being contemporary art’s “most famous drag queen", Morimura paints his face and painstakingly transforms his sartorial, facial and overall physical appearance to that of his subjects. From artist to subject (and object), male to female, Asian to Western, hidden to exposed, Morimura boldly appropriates a revered historical piece, only to playfully, completely turn it on its head.One of the things I love about contemporary art is its ability to engage audiences in participation and dialogue. Performance alone does not suffice, as the distance between artist and audience is sorely emphasized. By engaging the senses and encouraging activity, art ceases to be a hierarchical distinction and moves into a new realm of participation, reflection and agency.The magnum opus of The Experience Machine is SISYU+teamLab’s installation that presents a visually captivating spectacle, allows visitors to participate and act, and uses technology to reflect, not manipulate or violate, a natural milieu. Upon walking into a specially constructed black room, I was surrounded by screens depicting a surreal, otherworldly 3D landscape of nebula and falling kanji (Chinese characters). Intrigued, Mr. Sanada then prompted me to ‘touch’ a falling character. My action caused the kanji signifying ‘bird’ to transmogrify into an animated version of a bird. Mr. Sanada then proceeded to enliven ‘tree’, which the bird then flew to. This is just one of many instances of the everyday, arbitrary interactions between nature, the elements and animals that the installation mirrors with surprising accuracy. While we might often think of technology as automated, soulless and clinical, What a Loving, and Beautiful World demonstrates how SISYU+teamLab has invigorated their animation with the unpredictability and simple beauty of nature.While some might get lost in SISYU+teamLab’s technological playground, my favourite work from the show was unenviably positioned in a quiet corner in the neighbouring room. Walk into the room flashing with Jim Campbell and Ben Rubin’s light installations, and you might just leave without noticing Bea Camacho’s video, located on the floor in a corner next to the door. Interestingly, the artist herself made the curatorial decision to place her video screen in a negligible place.Enclose isn’t meant to scream out at you. On the contrary, as the title suggests, it wants to be hidden, isolated. Besides forcing the viewer to bend, squint and make a physical effort to watch her video, Camacho has refused to make Enclose a performance piece, isolating herself from the glare and scrutiny of a surveying audience and their emotional and auditory responses. By choosing not to sensationalize her emotions, Camacho makes a bold statement about artistic and personal integrity. Enclose is thus poignant because it is an act of catharsis, not a lurid, effusive spectacle.Having never been physically or emotionally close to her family, Camacho channels the rejection and loneliness she experienced (or is experiencing) by literally ensconcing herself in a crocheted cocoon. While crochet might evoke memories of familial warmth and affection, for Camacho, it refers to “an idealized version of home". Challenging the futility of fulfilling a romanticized fantasy, Camacho pushes herself to physical extremes by crocheting non-stop for 11 hours, going without rest, food or water. The artist as sufferer, a familiar concept popularized by Marina Abramovic, is here given new life by Camacho, who allows us to witness and experience her pain vicariously through her creative process. As The Experience Machine shows, this shiny new electronic age has more heart than we might think.
Japanese gallerist Ikkan Sanada showcases New Media Art by nine international artists in the exhibition titled The Experience Machine.Co curated by Andrew Herdon,director of Herdon Contemporary,a company that works with international emerging and mid-career artists to present new art to new audiences,this exhibition explores,this exhibition explores theories related to the historical differences between Western and Asian ways of seeing,understanding and experiencing the world.Flower and Corpse Glitch
By teamLab, animationJapanese group teamLab’s computer-generated 3-D virtual story animation captures the essence of traditional Japanese painting and a fairy tale.Exploring themes of nature,the clash of civilizations,cycles and symbiosis,the surface of the animation flakes away and reveals the underlying structure-the complex technology that forms the background to the work.The traditional Asian way of appreciating a painting is ‘duhua’(to read a painting) in China,or the concept of ‘narikiri’ (entering a picture,or visualizing a picture form inside it) in Japan.Without a specific focal point,the observer’s mind is allowed to drift into another world.What a Loving, and Beautiful World
By Sisyu+teamLab, interactive animation installationThis interactive animation installation,the product of a collaboration between the famous Japanese calligrapher Sisyu and teamLab,creates an immersive ‘environment’ combining projections with motion sensors in a darkened room.Kanji(Chinese characters) paper on the walls and fall slowly.When someone’s shadow touches the characters for words such as ‘moon’ and ‘butterfly’,they change their shape.This dynamic interaction shows the endlessly renewed beauty of the changes in the world caused by humans interaction with it.
A view of the installation “What a Loving, and Beautiful World" by Japanese calligrapher Sisyu and teamLab
by Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, ARTINFO
Published: September 19, 2012
Rather than being the sole creators of a work of art, new media artists often offer audiences the opportunity to interact with and contribute to their artworks.
"What a Loving, and Beautiful World" by Japanese calligrapher Sisyu and teamLab is such a piece where slowly falling kanji (the Chinese characters used in Japan) for words like ‘rain,’ ‘flower’ and ‘butterfly’ transform when touched by a viewer’s shadow to become the image of the word they represent while a corresponding sound is heard. This interactive animation installation, which combines projections with motion sensors in a darkened room, is a completely immersive experience, set — as the title suggests — in a beautiful world where rainbows appear after rain showers and butterflies snuggle up to flowers. It is also a very ephemeral experience which constantly changes. As in the natural world there are no identical moments thanks to 22 kanji falling randomly and interacting differently depending on how they meet (for example the butterflies flying toward flowers will change their course if a fire suddenly appears in front of them).
The work is part of “The Experience Machine," an exhibition dedicated to New Media at Ikkan Art Gallery, which include a selection of works by nine international artists: Bea Camacho, John Gerrard, John F. Simon Jr., Jim Campbell, Morimura Yasumasa, Sisyu+teamLab, Vuk Ćosić, Ben Rubin and Miao Xiaochun.
The exhibition seeks to explore the historical differences between Western and Asian art practices of portraying the world — i.e. the use of perspective and geometry in composition vs. the flat, perspective-free approach of traditional Chinese and Japanese paintings — as well as to explore how new media artists use technology to create new interpretations of space. Of particular note is Jim Campbell’s “Home Movie" (2006) installation, which uses widely spaced strings of individual LED lights hanging like a curtain to project back onto the wall found footage of old home movies. The LEDs are facing the wall, creating an image on its surface, but also partially blocking that low resolution image. The overall effect is ethereal.
“The Experience Machine" runs till October 27 at Ikkan Art Gallery
POSTED BY SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP ON 19 – SEP
Rather than being the sole creators of a work of art, new media artists often offer audiences the opportunity to interact with and contribute to their artworks. “What a Loving, and Beautiful World" by Japanese calligrapher Sisyu and teamLab is such a piece where slowly falling kanji (the Chinese characters used in Japan) for words like ‘rain,’ ‘flower’ and ‘butterfly’ transform when touched by a viewer’s shadow to become the image of the word they represent while a corresponding sound is heard.This interactive animation installation, which combines projections with motion sensors in a darkened room, is a completely immersive experience, set — as the title suggests — in a beautiful world where rainbows appear after rain showers and butterflies snuggle up to flowers. It is also a very ephemeral experience which constantly changes. As in the natural world there are no identical moments thanks to 22 kanji falling randomly and interacting differently depending on how they meet (for example the butterflies flying toward flowers will change their course if a fire suddenly appears in front of them).
The work is part of “The Experience Machine," an exhibition dedicated to New Media at Ikkan Art Gallery, which include a selection of works by nine international artists: Bea Camacho, John Gerrard, John F. Simon Jr., Jim Campbell, Morimura Yasumasa, SISYU+teamLab, Vuk Ćosić, Ben Rubin and Miao Xiaochun.