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The Mori Building Digital Art Museum: Borderless teamLab is a rather long and unusual name for a museum. It is also rather unusual, because it is the first museum exclusively dedicated to digital art in the world. Due to its unique focus on technology and digital art, this museum couldn’t be located anywhere else, but Tokyo, Japan, where technology is a national phenomenon.
One of the many interactive exhibits at the Museum of Digital Art in Tokyo, Japan
If originality was desired as a concept, the Japanese achieved it. Before going into detail about the attractions of this digital art mecca, let’s start by saying from the beginning that they could not find a better place to build it. The Digital Art Museum is located on Odaiba, an artificial island that is linked to Tokyo by a beautiful Rainbow Bridge, reaching almost 800 meters long.
Visitors at the museum interacting with one of its many exhibits.
The building occupies an area of 107,000 square feet and is divided into five rooms or huge spaces. In each of them 50 works of art are exhibited, some of regular size, others monumental and others of which it is difficult to determine their size or duration.
If in a normal art museum, one finds a fixed space for each painting, here it is a matter of playing with the continuity of “infinite” works that extend through variable spaces, which sometimes get shorter or lengthen on the walls, floors and white roofs of the enclosure.
“Here it is a matter of playing with the continuity of “infinite” works that extend through variable spaces.”
The works vary between projections of light, images, laser and, of course, sound over space; but it is a space where the viewer can explore and be surrounded by colored lights, making them part of the works themselves as they interact with them. Some may perceive the Digital Art Museum as a kind of “playground” for adults in a psychedelic way, which would not only be a fair definition, but an accurate one.
“It is a space where the viewer can explore and be surrounded by colored lights, making them part of the works themselves as they interact with them.”
Technologically, the museum employs 470 Epson projectors and uses 520 computers to expose any art made in the digital world, the Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless is a product of the efforts of the real estate company roots Mori Building (which provided the facilities) and the artistic collective teamLab, a group of devotees of the digital age who call themselves “ultratecnologistas” of, which Toshiyuki Inoko is the director and founder.
Guest visiting a dark room where lamps are lit in a chain.
In the 1990s, Inoko realized that he could combine his engineering studies with art, and created teamLab, a group of 300 people who are both artists and technicians. These people are the ones responsible for carrying out the digital works for the new museum, which can range from gardens made of light, to dark rooms where lamps are lit in a chain, until they are turned off and on again. Perfect, beautiful, fast, bright. ■
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