The outline of life’s existence is not the boundary of the physical body, but something ambiguous that also includes the environment continuous with it. As long as life is alive, it dissipates energy and moves the surrounding environment, such as the air. This work depicts the existence of a flock of birds through the energy the flock has given to the world. The existence called “I” is the mind, the body, and the environment continuous with them. A pebble, and things that humans have made up to now, have stable structures in and of themselves. Life, however, is different. A pebble will continue to exist even if it is placed in a sealed box cut off from the outside world, but life cannot maintain its existence when placed in such a closed box. Life is like a vortex born in the sea. A vortex is an existence within a flow, and the boundaries of its existence are ambiguous. In fact, a vortex is in a steady state, yet continues to writhe and appears like a single powerful living being. A vortex is not something that maintains a stable structure on its own; it is created by water continuously flowing from outside the vortex to inside it, and from inside to outside, and its structure is sustained by that flow. Life, too, takes in matter and energy from outside as food, releases matter, and dissipates energy outward while building an ordered structure. In other words, the structure of life is formed not by life itself, but by the environment continuous with it. Life is a miraculous phenomenon that arises in the flow of an open world, and like a vortex in the sea, it exists within an infinite continuum, with ambiguous boundaries to its existence. To be alive is to continue dissipating energy into the world and to remain continuous with the world. Work page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/w/dissipative_birds/himeji/

A tiny light born in the darkness returns to the darkness again. Artwork page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/life-ephemerallight-seadarkness-field/field/

Description: On a night of heavy rain, the rain falling on the grasslands becomes a work of art. Countless masses of light float in the air. Each mass of light is composed of two colors, with the boundary between the colors clearly separated as if it were solid. These masses of light, with sharply defined color boundaries unlike anything seen in nature, arise from extreme synchronization. Synchronization can be said to be the result of a synchronization phenomenon, a form of self-organization along the axis of time that creates large structures with order. When you touch a mass of light, you realize that what you had been seeing was part of the rain falling continuously without interruption. Life is like a fleeting crystal of light, a miraculous solidification within a continuum of energy that has kept flowing without interruption from a past whose beginning we cannot know. Work page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/ephemeral-crystallizedrain-field/field/

According to various studies, in forests, trees are connected to one another through networks of mycorrhizal fungi, recognizing each other and exchanging nutrients. At the center of this coexistence and mutual support are large, long-lived trees. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard calls such large trees mother trees. When a person approaches the tree, the nearest sphere glows brightly and emits a tone. The surrounding spheres respond one after another, continuing in sequence as they glow and sound. The tree is a tabunoki, a Japanese bay tree. In the poem “Iso no ue no tsumama o mireba ne o hae te toshifukakarashi kami sabinikeri” from the Man'yōshū, the oldest existing anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled from the late 7th century to the late 8th century, the word “tsumama” is said to refer to the tabunoki. The meaning is: “Looking at tsumama on the seaside rocks, it seems to have spread its roots far and lived many years. It has become divine.” Even 1,200 years ago, people may have felt a sense of mystery when seeing roots extending far into the forest as a whole. Work page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/tabunoki-tree-izura/izura/

Description: Beyond the deep forest on the mountain by the sea, there was a valley. There, we found the remains of rain-fed rice terraces, now turned into a wetland covered with reeds. It seemed like a secret rice terrace. As I reflected on the long passage of time in which nature and human activity have continued in succession, I decided to create a work based on the traces of rice terraces hidden in the forest. Artwork page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/hidden-traces-of-rice-terraces-izura/izura/

Description: Clusters of spacetime stand in abundance, and each cluster connects with the spacetime of the others. Within the mass of darkness, they begin to burn, then return to darkness again and again. They affect the surrounding area. When people stand before the flames burning inside the clusters, a black, absolute presence appears. Flames are a phenomenon of light and heat generated by combustion; they are also vaporized or decomposed matter within a flow, and an experiential sensation we perceive when seeing the boundary between phenomenon and substance. People recognize flames, an experiential sensation, as though they were a single object, and sometimes feel life within them. By the flow of combusting gas in clusters of spacetime, lines are drawn in space, and flames are created from the three-dimensional aggregation of those lines, then flattened by teamLab’s concept of a “super subjective space,” and the flames are rendered. teamLab is exploring the concept of “Distributed Art.” When you approach the flames of the work with the 《Distributed Fire》 app, a flame lights up on your smartphone, and you can take the work home with you. When you bring that carried flame near another person’s smartphone, a flame will light up there as well. By connecting the flame to someone else, and then to someone else again, the flames spread throughout the world. The entire expanding cluster of flames is drawn on the Flame Map. In Distributed Art, some works replicate themselves, while others share part of themselves with people. A work that has been passed into people’s hands will again generate its own replicas, as people actively disperse it. The work exists in a distributed way across people’s networks, and will become a decentralized art form. When the work exists on the network, it continues to exist even if the original disappears. Work page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/fireparticles-darkness-jeddah/jeddah/

When people touch flowers, the flowers fall and die. When people touch sand, the falling sand breaks. Since ancient times, people have watched sand fall and come to understand the concept of fleeting time, and through the changing of blooming flowers, they have sensed the passage of long time. The time carried by falling sand, the time in which flowers are born and die again and again, and the time of the human body—these different times intersect and overlap. The space of the flowers is framed by teamLab’s concept of “ultrasubjective space,” so unlike space framed by a lens or perspective, the viewer’s point of view is not fixed, and the body is liberated. And the wall on which the flowers are projected does not become a boundary between us and the artwork; the space of the flowers continues seamlessly with the space in which people’s bodies exist. Artwork page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/life-sandfall-jeddah/jeddah/

Wander, explore, and discover within one continuously connected world without boundaries. teamLab Borderless is a “museum without a map,” created from the boundaryless art of the art collective teamLab. The art leaves its rooms and moves around, relating to and affecting other works. There are no boundaries between the works, and at times they blend together. A single world made up of these works, continuously connected without boundaries. Immerse yourself bodily in boundaryless art, wander, explore with an intentional body, create a world together with others, and discover it. Exhibition details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/e/jeddah/

The “Light Sculpture - Flow” series gives rise to a massive light sculpture made of flowing light, which surges, expands, and envelops people. The Light Sculpture that is born in a space called “Asymmetric Space” emerges as a different, asymmetric existence from both physical space and the world inside the mirror, moving back and forth between the real world and the world inside the mirror. TeamLab has previously created immaterial sculptures—“spatial sculptures with ambiguous boundaries.” “Why do we sense an existence in a whirlpool in the sea? And why do we even perceive it as life? Even if the components are separated spatially and temporally, when order is formed within the parts, the parts are recognized as a single existence, and at times are even felt as something life-like.” Based on this idea, a collective of flowing light creates a living cosmos. Concept details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/concept/lightsculpture-flow

Viewed from the center near the entrance of the space. This work begins when the school of fish from 《The Way of the Sea》 enters “Cosmic Void.” When the school leaves the space and disappears, the work comes to an end. If you stand at the center near the entrance of the space, the boundary between wall and floor disappears, the real space vanishes, and the lines traced by the school’s movement begin to draw themselves three-dimensionally through the space. You become bodily immersed in the world of the work, and people will gradually lose the boundary between their bodies and the work’s world. The school of fish, drawn in light, swims freely through the space, and its traces become trails of light, drawing lines in the space. In Zen, there is a term called “chido,” or the path of birds. The way birds travel is not fixed like a human “road”; it means freedom and the absence of traces. The movement of schools of several thousand to tens of thousands of fish is beautiful and mysterious, seeming almost like a single gigantic life form. It is said that there is no leader in the school and no communication; instead, they move according to simple rules such as moving when the neighboring fish move. However, the physiological mechanism behind the near-simultaneous movements seen in schools of hundreds of fish remains shrouded in mystery. It feels as if there is a universal principle at work here that humanity has not yet understood. The work is continuously drawn in real time by a computer program. It is not a playback of prerecorded video. As a whole, it continues to transform without ever reproducing a previous state. The picture of this very moment can never be seen again. Work page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/wayofthesea-cosmicvoid-azabudai/tokyo/

Description: Through a multilayered collection of lines—some extending toward us, others stretching away—the flames are depicted as they melt and dissolve. The painting that emerges is determined by the focus of one’s own bodily eyes, yet that focus moves dynamically beyond one’s own will. Work page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/fire-of-particles-dissolving-azabudai/tokyo/

Description: Countless jiggling lights keep racing through an infinitely expanding space, where even depth is impossible to perceive. This work explores the question: “Even if the constituent elements are separated in space and time, when a different order is formed and they overlap, does it become the universe?” The jiggling lights are sculptures from teamLab’s art project “Cognitive Sculpture,” which do not exist in the physical world, but exist in the world of perception. Work page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/microcosmoses-azabudai/tokyo/?autoplay=true

Inside the spheres, there are myriad lights intermingled: lights with tangible material existence, large, strong lights like soap bubbles, huge, weak, jiggly lights like lumps of jelly, and lights generated by the surrounding environment. Within the spheres, some lights keep moving while others remain completely still. The light in each sphere cannot generate everything on its own; the other spheres become the environment, and the environment generates the myriad lights within each sphere. Each sphere becomes part of the environment that generates the light of the other spheres, and the phenomena created by the environment are the existence of the work. Also, except for the material light, such as the soap-bubble-like light and the jelly-like light that appears strongly within spheres at higher positions, the light does not physically exist inside the spheres; it exists in perception. And when it exists in perception, it is existence. When a person stops near a sphere and remains still, the nearest sphere shines brightly and resounds with a tone, and the light propagates from that sphere to the nearest sphere. The propagated light continues on to the next nearest sphere, and so on. The light always continues only to the nearest sphere, passing through each sphere only once, becoming a single light path that traverses all the spheres. And the light born from oneself and the light born from others intersect. The seemingly random arrangement of the spheres is a configuration in which the light generated by people’s presence continues from sphere to sphere, a configuration for the beauty of continuity itself. Specifically, the positions of the spheres in space are mathematically determined so that, when lines are drawn from each sphere to the nearest sphere in three-dimensional space, they form a single connected line that can be drawn in one stroke, with the same start and end point (unicursal), and so that the line, which becomes the path of light, is beautiful. As a result, although the light of the spheres responding to people only propagates to the nearest sphere, it passes through all the spheres only once, like a one-stroke drawing. At the same time, it intersects with the light generated by others during the same period. This is a work that expresses the beauty of continuity in the light created when people interact with spheres in free spaces. Work page: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/ew/bubbleuniverse-azabudai/tokyo/?autoplay=true

Wander, explore, and discover within one continuous world without boundaries teamLab Borderless is a “museum without a map,” consisting of the boundaryless art of the art collective teamLab. The art leaves the room and moves about, interacting with and being affected by other works; there are no boundaries between the works, and they sometimes blend together. A single world that continues without boundaries, made up of such works. Immerse yourself bodily in boundaryless art, wander through it, explore with an intentional body, and create and discover the world together with others. Exhibition details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/e/tokyo/

The contours of life’s existence are ambiguous, not defined by the boundary of the body itself, but by the surrounding environment that is continuous with it. This work is a massive sculpture group that continuously depicts the energy birds actually flying around it impart to the surrounding environment. When birds fly, their energy moves through the environment, such as the air. In the wind blowing here and now, the energy dissipated by the birds is depicted as the present moment’s wind is infused with the memory of the birds flying at this instant, and of the birds that flew from sunrise to sunset today. If no birds fly around the sculptures, this sculpture group becomes completely dark, dissolves into the darkness, and is almost nonexistent. On the island in the pond where the sculptures stand, in order to create an environment favorable to birds, plants that birds like are planted along with the sculptures, including vegetation that attracts the insects birds eat. This sculpture group comes into existence through birds gathering around these plants. However, birds, and insects as well, do not exist solely through the vegetation on the pond island; they exist through the forest and pond ecosystem of the vast botanical garden. The contours of this sculpture group’s existence are also not the boundary surface of a material sculpture, but continuous and ambiguous in relation to the surrounding environment. “teamLab Botanical Garden Osaka” (Nagai Botanical Garden, Osaka) Exhibition details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/e/botanicalgarden/ Work details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/w/sculptures_of_dissipative_birds/botanicalgarden/

With the concept of “catch, observe, and release,” this new learning project focuses on exploring with your own body, discovering, catching, and then expanding your interests through what you have caught. Using a smartphone in hand, you explore, catch various prehistoric animals such as dinosaurs, observe them, and build your own collection guidebook. In Dinosaur Forest, dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals live. When you touch an animal, it turns around or runs away. When you use the app’s camera to look at the animals moving through the space, and fire an “observation arrow” at an animal visible in the camera, the arrow flies into the real-world space. When the “observation arrow” hits, the animal disappears from the space and enters your smartphone. Information about the animal you observed is collected in the app’s guidebook. If you swipe a caught animal to a location visible in the app’s camera, it is released and returns to that place. Also, if you throw down an “observation net” at a place you like, you can spread the net at your feet. Working together with people around you, use your body to drive the animals into the “observation net” and catch them; the animals disappear from the space and are collected in the guidebook in the same way. If you swipe a caught animal to a location visible in the app’s camera, it is released and appears at your feet. In the collection guidebook, even for the same animal, the more times you catch it, the more detailed information is added. “Galaxy & teamLab: Catching and Collecting Dinosaur Forest” (Harajuku, Tokyo) Exhibition details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/e/collecting_dinosaurforest/ Artwork details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/w/collecting_dinosaurforest/collecting_dinosaurforest/

An immersive operatic space that transcends the concept of opera through a sculptural space of light The art collective teamLab designed the scenography for a new production of Giacomo Puccini’s final opera, Turandot. Together with director Daniel Kramer, they conceived a scenography that fused Kramer’s interpretation of Turandot with teamLab’s art. Over five years of planning, they explored the concept, new interpretations, metaphors, symbols, and how to realize the visual expression of each scene. The cast becomes immersed in, and united with, a sculptural space of light, and the stage and audience continue seamlessly without boundaries. This production had its world premiere at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland in June 2022, and the Tokyo performances by Tokyo Nikikai Opera Theatre were held from February 23 to 26, 2023. Performance details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/e/turandot_tokyo/

This work exists somewhere in some era, and also here and now. In the work’s world, under the same flow of time as the real world, morning comes with sunrise at the place where the work is installed, and night begins with sunset. If it rains in the real world at the place where the work is installed, it also rains in the work’s world. Flowers and grasses change day by day with the seasons. People’s lives also change constantly according to the time of day and weather in the real world, while festivals and events are held with the seasons. As various stories are added each day, people’s activities continue on permanently. The work’s world is influenced by the viewer’s behavior. When the viewer touches the people in the work’s world, they react, but if the contact is slight, they return to their everyday lives. However, if the viewer continues to touch the people, those nearby begin to quarrel, which escalates into killing, and before long the conflict spreads throughout the town, engulfing it in flames. The fire continues for more than a year, the people die out, and the town is completely burned away. Even in the devastated town with no one left, as time passes in the real world, the sun rises and sets, the seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter come and go, and a few months later, new grasses and flowers sprout from the charred remains. Flowers and grasses are born, bloom, and fall in repeated cycles, changing day by day in the flow of real time. And over a long period of time, trees and plants grow thick and dense, repeating the changing of flowers each year, continuing forever. Once this world begins to burn, it can never again be seen as it was before the fire. And the viewer is also a participant in its consequences. Related exhibition: Aomori Museum of Art https://www.teamlab.art/jp/e/aomorimuseum/ Work details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/w/world_of_irreversiblechange/

In an infinitely expanding space, the calligraphy of “Kūsho” is written endlessly, while its chanting echoes throughout. If you lie down, or sit for a while, your body will eventually begin to float and merge with the world of the work. Calligraphy has the voice of its characters. As the calligraphy draws near, so does the voice. “Kūsho” refers to the calligraphy TeamLab has been creating in space since its founding. The qualities contained in the ink traces of calligraphy—such as depth, speed, and the force of the stroke—are reconstructed three-dimensionally in space through a new interpretation, and then transformed into two dimensions by the logical structure of TeamLab’s “Ultra Subjective Space.” The calligraphy moves back and forth between the flat and the three-dimensional. “Prayer” Exhibition (Tokyo) Exhibition details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/e/prayer/ Work details: https://www.teamlab.art/jp/w/eternaluniverse/prayer/

In space, an ensō emerges, and the body passes through that ensō as a whole. This circle of light is a perfect, undistorted circle—a true circle. Even if you keep walking forward for several steps, the perfect circle continues. An ensō, one of the forms of calligraphy and painting in Zen, is a circle drawn with a single brushstroke; in ancient times, it was sometimes represented by tracing a circular ring in the air with a staff or similar object. It is said to symbolically express enlightenment, truth, the universe as a whole, and equality. It is also a circle that reflects the heart of the viewer, leaving interpretation to each person. “teamLab & TikTok, teamLab Reconnect: Art and Sauna” (Keyakizaka, Tokyo) Exhibition details: https://reconnect.teamlab.art/en Work details: https://www.teamlab.art/en/w/walkthrough_lightcircles/