Obnoxious camera-wielders block live concerts; cinemas are lit by furious screen tappers; museums become photoshoots; the Mona Lisa has been reduced to a background prop. Were you even there if you didn’t take a picture?
One art exhibition, however, embraces the Instagram of it all. TeamLab art exhibitions allow visitors to interact with playgrounds of light, color and sound as a whimsical photo opportunity.
TeamLab is an international art collective that started in Japan and has expanded globally from Sydney to Saudi Arabia. Their mission: “to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology and the natural world.”
Photo: Hollie Younger
Taipei hosted a teamLab pop-up in 2022, drawing over 300,000 visitors. This year’s exhibition, on view until Oct. 13 at Shilin’s National Taiwan Science Education Center, is a multi-room, multi-sensory feat of engineering and state-of-the-art design that focuses on “collaborative creation (co-creation),” where the guests work together as artists, designing and creating the world around them.
Like the Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory of digital art, the floor undulates below, blooming flowers at our footprints; we place our hands on the screens and tiny dancing cartoon people climb up to greet us; melodies symphonize as our bodies bump against glowing orbs in the “Light Ball Orchestra.”
Every motion of every visitor dictates the visual and auditory simulations, creating a trippy, sensory-altering environment so immersive that adults are reduced to the same wide-eyed wonder as their children.
Photo: Hollie Younger
In a darkened alcove, we’re invited to color in an amphibian, butterfly or flower with oil pastels. Staff scan and upload our designs to the art motherboard, and our scribbles instantly enter the third dimension, scuttling and slithering into the main hall.
My rainbow lizard eats my friend’s David Bowie-inspired frog, multiplying and scattering across the walls. The drawings interact symbiotically, squished underfoot or devoured by another doodle further up the food chain, as we chase our group’s salamanders and snakes around the room.
CHILD FRIENDLY
Photo: Hollie Younger
TeamLab is very child-friendly, designed to bring out everyone’s inner child, despite intermittent pleas of weary attendants to “Stop running!” and “Be careful!”
A 20-foot slide of animated fruit and a hop-scotch of stepping stones over a twinkling river attract old and young to whoosh down and leap across.
But while visually stunning, the attraction led me to reflect on the influence of Instagram culture and digital narcissism as much as I appreciated artistic digitalism.
In the main hall, sunflowers bloom across LED screens, ostriches comprised of forget-me-not bouquets dash past, the light undulates purple then blue — and models strike editorial poses for professional cameras; a mother and daughter duo hold up peace signs for a cutesy selfie. Even Kim Kardashian, the Instagram queen herself, has used a Teamlab attraction for a photoshoot.
Another room sees children color in planes, trains and automobiles — then control and observe their movements via tablet devices, eyes once again locked on screens.
One exhibit features inflated beach balls designed to change color and create sound upon organic movement and guest interaction, although visitors seem more concerned with switching them pink for the perfect photo prop.
Ironically, the teamLab Future Park Web site claims that, “large numbers of people are addicted to smartphones. Their brains may be connected, but their bodies are isolated.” But is this social media playground the savior of human connection?
In the 2019 book Advancing Humanity: teamLab’s Borderless World, teamLab founder Toshiyuki Inoko said he dislikes the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa as the art isn’t interactive. Once the space changes with the experiences of others, their existence actually enhances the artwork.
Crowds with cameras are still annoying, pulling visitors out of immersive experiences and into shallower waters. But it makes for fantastic free marketing.
And, admittedly, my Instagram story looked great last weekend.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
RSS