Commissioned to create an installation for the masterpiece Alice in Wonderland, I wanted to create a space where visitors could feel as if they had entered the mysterious world within the story. The various unbelievable events Alice experiences are wondrous, but at the same time they are filled with the intellectual curiosity and excitement we felt as children—thoughts like “Wouldn’t it be great if this happened?” and “What if this happened?” For the installation, we wrote down countless “wouldn’t it be great if...” ideas and exchanged many proposals, and in the end we decided on the concept of John Tenniel’s beautiful illustrations coming to life and moving in response to the viewer. The small 2.5-meter-square room was designed as a “special place for connecting with Alice’s world.” Inside the 14 frames hanging on the walls are iPads, each displaying a character from Alice’s story. Based on John Tenniel’s original illustrations, 3D model data was created for the characters, and through shader programming, real-time image processing makes them look like paintings drawn with hatching techniques, so at first glance they appear to be ordinary framed artworks. When a person stands on the carpet in the center of the room, a Kinect v2 sensor detects their pose, and all the characters in the frames slowly begin to move and “mimic” the person’s stance. The playfulness that fills Alice’s world contains many suggestions for the way we live and work today. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argued that “play” is the essence of human activity and the source from which culture arises. French philosopher Roger Caillois developed this view of humanity, identifying mimicry, meaning “imitation,” as one of the four fundamental elements of play, and noting that it played a particularly important role in primitive societies. In addition, in Mozart, Hideo Kobayashi points out that Mozart was a genius of imitation, and that his original music was born out of imitation. We can discover many things through play and develop culture. We created this work in the hope that many people, through the story of Alice and this exhibition, would feel the importance of filling everyday life with more play.

teamLab will participate in the “2019 Beijing International Horticultural Exposition,” held in Beijing, China, and present the interactive work “teamLab: Continuous Life in a Beautiful World.” Exhibited in the Botanic Garden, this work depicts a world of continuous life through the rich, beautiful ecosystem of a mangrove forest and the life that inhabits it. Through art, we seek to explore new relationships between humans and nature, and between the self and the world. “teamLab: Continuous Life in a Beautiful World” begins with life-size mangroves, and as visitors gradually become smaller, it transforms into an enlarged underwater world, and then further into a microscopic world of microorganisms that cannot usually be seen. It aims to reveal the rich, beautiful, and continuous life of the mangroves, ordinarily unseen, and to bring people together in a single space where they become one and influence one another.

We produced a product story film to explain the features of Showa Nishikawa’s new brand, “MuAtsu+,” in a clear and engaging way. By conveying the product’s strengths to users through a story, the film creates an experience that naturally helps them understand the product. We also produced an introduction video for the body fitting system at “MuAtsu Sleep Lab.,” a showroom where visitors can experience the full range of the brand’s products. The visual design uses a simple, clean style that strips away anything unnecessary in order to highlight the bedding. For the sound design, we focused on texture to express a quiet sense of comfort, using gentle instrumental tones.