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Featured on The Asahi Shimbun AJW, 2015/10/31

Japan Pavilion takes top design prize at Milan expo

Japan Pavilion takes top design prize at Milan expo MILAN–Featuring stunning computer-graphic images of Japan and elegant “washoku” (traditional Japanese cuisine), the Japan Pavilion captured the gold prize for best exhibition design at Expo Milan 2015 on Oct. 30.“This is the result of all of us coming together,” said Tatsuya Kato, the commissioner general of the Japan Pavilion. “Although we could only tell a part of our culinary culture through the exhibits, I hope people gained a sense of Japan’s contributions to the world.”With the theme of “Harmonious Diversity,” the pavilion drew more than 2 million visitors during the expo, which was titled “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.”The pavilion offered breathtaking CG images of farming villages in the four seasons of Japan, and enabled visitors to experience traditional Japanese dishes, as well as the time-honored techniques of how to cook them.The gold prize was presented by the International Exhibitions Bureau, which oversees the organization of international expos.The Milan expo kicked off in May and concludes Oct. 31.By YUKIE YAMAO/ Correspondent

Featured on 週刊新潮, Oct 29, 2015

ミラノ万博「日本館」が圧倒的な人気になった理由

イタリア人は行列を作れない、という声は昔から聞かれる。レジ前に並んでいても、たちまち横入りされるし、美術館やオペラのチケット売り場には、行列の代わりに黒山の人だかりができる。そんなイタリアで今、椿事が起きている。(Excerpt from the text)

Featured on The Boston Globe, Oct 22, 2015

Japanese collective teamLab enchants at Radcliffe

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

Featured on Boston Magazine, Oct 21, 2015

Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute Displays a Touch-Sensitive Digital Artwork

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.

Featured on The Harvard Crimson, Oct 20, 2015

'What a Loving and Beautiful World' Brings Digital Art to Radcliffe

“Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end,” art critic Robert Hughes wrote in 1990. Hughes lamented creative production’s submission to the immaterial, to the mind-numbing spectacle of television. Yet 25 years later, even with the advent of the internet and the further absorption of everyday experience into the disembodied realm of the digital, the contemporary Japanese artistic collective teamLab sets out to push the bounds of media art.teamLab, whose multimedia installation “What a Loving and Beautiful World” opened at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on Friday, Oct. 16, engages with this question of the expressive potential of digital media. In the installation space, Japanese characters float on gallery walls rendered luminous veils of color by light projections. When the viewer reaches out to touch a character, the symbol transforms into the image it represents: Silver waves ripple out from the point of contact with the character for “sea,” and pink cherry blossoms burst from the character for “flower.” As more visitors enter the space, images whirl across the walls, then subside. Within the installation, the boundaries between text and image, nature and culture, spectator and actor are constantly in flux.Through digital media, teamLab’s artists, calligraphers, programmers, and engineers create a participatory visual environment that is both playful and meditative. “teamLab demonstrates what is possible when people with different kinds of expertise—in the arts, engineering, computer science, robotics, architecture, different areas of design—come together to solve artistic problems,” writes Yukio Lippit, professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard and the exhibition’s curator, in an email.Meg Rotzel, the Radcliffe Institute’s Arts Program Manager and a practicing artist, believes that the immersivity of teamLab’s installation renders it uniquely compelling. “I’m happiest when I’m really in my work, when I’m thinking and making simultaneously,” she says. “When I go to a museum, normally I feel like I’m here and the work of art is there, and there’s a separation. But with ‘What a Loving and Beautiful World,’ you can see whole groups of people just playing in the art, within the space of the work of art.”Hughes feared the passivity enforced by media spectacle, but teamLab uses digital media to invite the viewer to participate in the art’s making. The gallery acts as a canvas upon which the viewer inscribes his or her curiosity. Because the animation responds to the actions of viewers, the possibilities for visual variation are endless: The installation will never look the same twice. Lippit says that he appreciates the work’s capacity to give visible form to the viewer’s thoughts. “I really enjoy standing in the room and doing nothing. Somehow, the work responds,” he writes. “In theory it is supposed to be interactive and ‘triggered’ by the movements of viewers, but the installation somehow takes on new moods and can quicken its metabolism even if one does nothing, generating an uncanny sensation. It is like a mindscape.”Within the dreamlike gallery space, teamLab weaves together calligraphy and computer-generated images, the expressive gesture of the artist’s hand and the pixel, traditional artistic practice and modern digital technology. Melissa McCormick, Harvard professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Lippit’s wife, says that teamLab’s work engages with both the conditions of contemporary life and with artistic precedent. “Traditional Japanese painting is radical by many standards: It uses a multidimensional and shifting perspective, [it] folds time into spatial representation, and its formats are immersive and anticipate the movement and touch of the viewer,” McCormick writes in an email. “These are all things that have come to characterize digital art made in our current age…but teamLab’s work emphasizes their connection to art in the past and encourages new ways of thinking about links between the science of perception, consciousness, and artistic representation.”She adds that teamLab’s work has resonance beyond the field of art history. “It would be hard to find a better example of the kind of visually stunning and even poignant results that can emerge through an integration of art and science, something in which many on this campus are thoroughly engaged,” she writes.Lippit also emphasizes the potential of the work to broaden students’ experience of the arts. “It is not often that Harvard exhibits contemporary artists from Japan or Asia, and the exhibition expands the purview of the arts featured here,” he writes.The installation “What a Loving and Beautiful World” will be on view in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery in Byerly Hall in Radcliffe Yard until Nov. 14.

Featured on HARVARD gazette, Oct 19, 2015

For gallery visitors, a chance to be one with the art

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.”

Featured on the creators project, Sep 18, 2015

A Balloon Light Pyramid Illuminates Japanese Ruins

The lightning speed at which teamLab releases new work is mindboggling. Seriously, it’s hard to believe anyone in the collective even sleeps. Coming off their recently released Crystal Universe, the Japanese artists are back with yet another interactive light installation set in the ruins of Shizuoka City’s Sunpu Castle.A gridded network of 108 white balloons, or “globes,” floats in mid-air, creating a pyramid shape that resembles the roof of a house. The floating spheres change color when touched and emit a sound “unique to that color,” according to teamLab’s description. The surrounding balloons then echo the same sound and color in a rippling effect that alters the entire color of the piece.The site-specific installation was constructed in dedication to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan, who built and died in the Sunpu Castle.In the video’s description, teamLab writes, “In this pyramid of light unfolds a show of light and sound themed on Lord Ieyasu’s life.” Check out a preview of the installation in action below:

Featured on FASHION PRESS, Sep, 2015

「ナイトワンダーアクアリウム2015」新江ノ島水族館で開催!チームラボが贈る大水槽の幻想的な世界

新江ノ島水族館が「えのすい×チームラボ ナイトワンダーアクアリウム2015」を、2015年7月18日(土)から12月25日(金)まで開催する。昨年、33万人以上が来場した夜間イベントに続き、新江ノ島水族館が「進化するえのすい」をテーマに掲げ、世界で最も注目を浴びるアート集団、「チームラボ」とともに幻想的な空間を創り、新しい夜の水族館の楽しみ方を演出する。■展示紹介今回は一足早くナイトアクアリウムの見どころを紹介する。入口から、海中の遊園地に入ったかのような世界観に驚く。大きな光の球体がクラゲのように浮遊している空間は「呼応する球体と夜の魚たち」というアトラクション。光るボールに人がぶつかるたびに色が変わり、幻想的な音が鳴る。また、そのボールのまわりにも派生し、まるで生き物のように見た目を変え、見るものを飽きさせない。光の球体の世界を抜けると、水槽がいくつも連続して展示される小さな海の世界が。人が近づくことで水槽の光の色が変化する。また、それに合わせて他の水槽の色も変わり、イルミネーションのように音楽と光の呼応が広がっていくのが魅力的だ。そしてメインの水槽「相模湾大水槽」へ。「花と魚 – 相模湾大水槽」と題された今シーズンは、水槽全体に花を咲かせるプロジェクションが。この映像の大きな特徴は、もともと作成されたものではなく、水槽の魚たちの動きに合わせてリアルタイムで永遠に変容し続けること。魚やエイが水槽の近くを横切ると、その魚に花柄を投影、そして水槽の周りの花々は、魚が近づくと散っていく。その瞬間にしか見ることができない一瞬のアートが見るものを魅了する仕掛けだ。そして大人から子供までが楽しめる企画が「お絵描き水族館」。この水族館では、私たちが書いた魚が実際に投影された水槽の中を泳ぐという驚きの体験が待っている。魚の形が書かれた紙に思い思いの色や模様を塗って、機械に読み込ませると、実際に泳いでいるかのように動きだす。また、描かれた魚たちは、人の手が近づくと避けて行ったり、餌が落とされると群がったりと、リアルな水槽の魚たちのような行動をとるのも面白い。海水浴の後やデートの最後にも寄りやすい立地、時間帯で開催されるので、普段は見ることができない、最新技術と魅惑の魚たちのコラボレーションで生まれる夜の水族館を楽しんでほしい。そして2015年9月19日(土)より、新たな作品「空書 ライン、魚、そして、しんかい2000」が展示開始。日本初の本格的な有人潜水調査船「しんかい2000」がある空間を、光の空書で取り囲んだアート空間に変身させる。空書とは、チームラボがここ10年ほど取り組んでいる空間に書く書。書の墨跡が持つ深さや速さ、力の強さのようなものを新たな解釈で空間に立体的に再構築している。【情報詳細】えのすい×チームラボ ナイトワンダーアクアリウム2015開催期間:2015年7月18日(土)~12月25日(金)※開催期間中休催日あり開催場所:新江ノ島水族館住所:神奈川県藤沢市片瀬海岸2-19-1開催時間:17:00~20:00入場料:大人 2,100円 高校生 1,500円 小・中学生1,000円 幼児(3歳以上) 600円主催:新江ノ島水族館 チームラボ 日本テレビ放送網※本イベントは夜間特別イベント※水族館の入場料のみで回覧可。http://www.team-lab.net/wp-content/uploads/Flowers-and-Fish_main1.jpg">http://www.team-lab.net/wp-content/uploads/Flowers-and-Fish_main1.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="576" />http://www.team-lab.net/wp-content/uploads/ResonatingSpheresandNightFish.jpg">http://www.team-lab.net/wp-content/uploads/ResonatingSpheresandNightFish.jpg" alt="" width="4344" height="2443" />