Have you ever walked alongside a whale whose movements follow your every step? Do you know what it’s like to watch flowers tower 10 feet above your head?
Well, once you visit the Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless in Tokyo, you can add those over-the-top memories to your log of experiences.
Billed as the world’s largest museum dedicated to digital art when it opened in June 2018, the 10,000-square-meter landscape is the brainchild of the interdisciplinary art collective known as teamLab, a group of engineers, programmers, architects and mathematicians. The exhibition reached 1 million visitors in November 2018 just five months after opening, and has quickly become one of Tokyo’s most Instagramable destinations, an absolute must-see for art and tech lovers alike.
Visitors wander through interconnected zones where immersive imagery created with 3D mapping and responsive projections flows throughout the museum’s corridors and rooms. The dreamlike landscape stems from 520 computers and 470 high-tech projectors, along with approximately 60 interactive displays that defy the rules of traditional art viewing.
One area, called Borderless World, features multiple projections of “natural” surroundings. A technicolor sea of flowers, for example, covers the space from top to bottom, until a waterfall splashes down onto a central rock, where viewers are invited to gather. Nearby in the Athletics Forest, guests walk through a mental and physical obstacle course complete with trampolines, larger-than-life props and ever-changing terrain.
“The borderless artworks transform according to the presence of people,” explains teamLab founder Toshiyuki Inoko, “and as we immerse and meld ourselves into this unified world, we explore a new relationship that transcends the boundaries between people, and between people and the world.”
And while there is no dress code, you may want to wear light colors so your clothes capture the dancing patterns, along with flat shoes to interact freely with the built landscape. Then you can be truly borderless as you wander between these ephemeral, transporting worlds.