teamLab - Interactive art exploration & info

This application can be utilized in the following exhibitions:

- teamLab Borderless Tokyo (Azabudai Hills, Tokyo)

- teamLab Planets (Toyosu, Tokyo)

- teamLab: Hidden Traces of Rice Terraces (izura, Ibaraki)

- teamLab Botanical Garden Osaka (Nagai Botanical Garden, Osaka)

- teamLab: A Forest Where Gods Live (Mifuneyama Rakuen, Takeo Hot Springs, Kyushu)

- teamLab Ruins and Heritage Rinkan Spa & Tea Ceremony (Mifuneyama Rakuen, Takeo Hot Springs, Kyushu)

- teamLab SuperNature (The Venetian Macao, Macao)

- teamLab Borderless Jeddah (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)

- teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)

A description of the artwork is available within the exhibition area.

- teamLab Planets (Toyosu, Tokyo):

- teamLab SuperNature (The Venetian Macao, Macao)

Within the Crystal Universe, if you swipe up on a star, it will materialize in the exhibition area.

- teamLab Borderless Tokyo (Azabudai Hills, Tokyo)

- teamLab Borderless Jeddah (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)

The pieces at teamLab Borderless are dynamic, changing, and interact with one another.

Upon entering a room, activate the teamLab app to deepen your understanding of the artwork you are encountering.

In the Crystal World, by swiping up on a character, you can unleash the world contained within into the surrounding space.

Eight Places to Get Obsessed With teamLab’s Immersive Art

The group’s psychedelic sensory playgrounds of light, sound, stars, bubbles, birds and more are expanding around the globe, dazzling millions of visitors a year.

There’s a reason millions of visitors are obsessed with teamLab’s art exhibitions: Where else can you spend an otherwise normal afternoon gazing into an infinity of crystal stars, chasing digital crows from room to room, or making flowers grow with the touch of a single, godlike finger?

TeamLab, an international collective of mathematicians, engineers and artists emerged in 2001, gaining traction with an early staging by the artist Takashi Murakami. Since then, the group, whose works aim to “navigate the confluence of art, science, technology and the natural world,” has expanded globally, with permanent and temporary exhibitions in Asia, Europe and the United States. Last year, teamLab Planets, in Tokyo, welcomed 2.5 million people, setting a Guinness record as the most visited museum by a single art group.

TeamLab currently has 12 exhibitions in Japan, as well as sites in places like Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Macau, Miami, New York, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Installations or museums are planned for Hamburg, Germany; Utrecht, the Netherlands; Kyoto, Japan; and more.

These sensory playgrounds couldn’t be farther from a sterile white art gallery. You may find yourself wading through a pool (yes, actual water) with digital koi fish or playing with streaming whirlpools of pixels. Sometimes the installations are set outdoors in dark rice paddies, as in Izura, Japan, or use strings of live orchids that rise and drop depending on your path, as at the Planets museum. In “Sketch” installations at several sites you use crayons to color in a creature, which then comes alive as a projection on the walls and the floor.

Where art, tech and nature collide: teamLab opens an immersive new experience in Abu Dhabi

Entering through the doors into a darkened reception, your eyes take a second to adjust to the extreme contrast to the bright white outside. The darkness is meant to heighten your senses for what awaits inside — a collection of 25 interactive digital art exhibits.

The museum is divided into two zones: dry and wet. In many of the dry areas, the floor of the exhibits undulates, because, says teamLab’s principal interior architect Shogo Kawata, the soles of our feet aren’t flat, and are therefore more suited to walk across organic shapes than even surface. Doing so can bring visitors closer to nature, he says.

In the wet zones, shoes and socks are removed and trousers rolled up, as guests move through areas flooded with shallow water. Walking through one exhibit, the water level rises and falls, changing your proximity to the digitally projected artworks.

Moving around the museum is an experience in itself. Light projections on the floors and walls react to your movements and presence, and reaching out to touch the installations feels playful and thought-provoking.

Entering one exhibit in the wet area, you’re met with an earthy, organic smell from the water. “Floating Microcosms” is a collection of unanchored soft sculptures — or “Ovoids” — bobbing in ankle-deep water. Wading around can create waves which topple these Ovoids, and they fall over, only to rise again, emanating different colored lights and sound tones. The Ovoids can also be pushed over and moved around by visitors, so the exhibit is constantly transformed. Kawata wants visitors to have “physical experiences — to smell and touch things” and to “take home the feeling they had visiting this space.”

teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi

In “Wind Form,” lights projected on the uneven ground and walls are meant to replicate the movement of wind. Moving through, the artwork reacts to you, as if you are blocking the natural passage of a breeze; the lights stop where your feet touch the ground, and you can see the ripples of this change spread over the walls around you.

"Wind Form" has lights that moves around visitors, like a breeze. 

teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi

Toshiyuki Inoko is one of the founders of teamLab. Established in 2001 in Japan, the international collective comprises artists, architects and tech specialists, with a mission to help visitors to move beyond perceived boundaries of the world by experiencing their art.

Inoko says that it is an honor to have his museum open amongst the other landmarks in Saadiyat Cultural District — already well-established locations like the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Manarat Al Saadiyat gallery, as well as many currently in development, such as the Guggenheim, the Zayed National Museum, and the Natural History Museum.

He hopes that by engaging with the exhibits and seeing them react to their presence

visitors take away a new “connection with themselves and with the environment itself.”