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.

Art collective. Active since 2001. An international interdisciplinary group that explores the intersection of art, science, technology, and the natural world through collective creativity. It is composed of specialists from a wide range of fields, including artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects. teamLab seeks to use art to explore the relationship between the self and the world, and to discover new ways of perceiving it. In order to perceive the world, people tend to divide it into separate entities with boundaries. They seek to transcend the boundaries of perception, the boundary between the self and the world, and the cognitive boundaries of continuity in time. Everything exists, precariously and miraculously, on the seamless continuity of a vast expanse of time.