Living Crystallized Light

teamLab, 2022, Interactive Installation, Sound: teamLab

Living Crystallized Light

teamLab, 2022, Interactive Installation, Sound: teamLab

Like an organic entity created from crystallized light, the work shines iridescently from its center as it moves around, merging and dividing continuously.

People can walk into the artwork, and even if they do so, the artwork will continue to be maintained, its existence unharmed. If a person touches the artwork, they realize that what they are looking at is ordinary water. The artwork’s existence is not independent, but is actually a unique phenomenon created by its environment.
The places where the work appears will change as the viewer moves. The work’s appearance is unique to the viewer, so someone viewing the artwork from another angle will see a different colored work appearing in a different place. In other words, the existence of the artwork being seen is created by its environment, and exists only in the viewer.

Environmental Phenomena

teamLab explores the creation of artworks based on the concept of environmental phenomena, in which the artworks do not exist independently, but are created by the environment that produces the various phenomena.

Objects like stones and man-made creations maintain a stable structure on their own. Unlike these, the existence of the artworks are dependent on their environment.

The environment produces phenomena and stabilizes their structure - these stabilized phenomena are what create the existence of the artworks.

Environmental phenomena are released from the material substances that have been responsible for maintaining structures of existence. Elements like air, water, and light that permeate our daily lives are transformed by their environment into unique phenomena that become works of art. The boundaries of their existence are ambiguous and continuous. Even if people destroy the work, the work will remain in existence as long as its environment is maintained. On the contrary, the work will disappear if the environment is not maintained.
In time, people's consciousness will expand from existence itself to the environment.

A stone can continue to exist in a closed box, sealed off from the outside world, but life cannot sustain its existence in such a box because it is created by its environment.

Life is a miraculous phenomenon that emerges from a flow in a continuous world.