teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM

teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM is a permanent digital art museum by the art collective teamLab, at Azabudai Hills in Toranomon, Minato, Tokyo. It opened here on 9 February 2024. teamLab calls it a museum without a map: works leave their rooms, move through the building, act on one another and sometimes mix, forming one continuous world rather than separate galleries.

The idea rests on how people see. teamLab holds that a camera frame divides the viewer from the image, while the body takes in the world as continuous. Its works avoid a fixed point of view and change with where people stand and how they move, so that visitors become part of the work.

Selected works

Universe of Water Particles on a Rock where People Gather is a waterfall that falls on a rock recreated in virtual three-dimensional space. Its water is calculated as a mass of particles whose movement draws lines, and it changes with the rock, the people on it and other works that enter the room.

In Sketch Ocean, fish drawn on paper start to swim in a projected sea. They scatter when touched, and at times they leave the room and swim into other works. Tuna swim on to versions of the work elsewhere in the world, and tuna drawn elsewhere can arrive here.

At the EN TEA HOUSE, flowers bloom in a freshly made cup of tea in Flowers Bloom in an Infinite Universe inside a Teacup. They keep blooming while tea remains and scatter when the cup is lifted, and the work ends when the tea has been drunk.

People Don't See the World as through a Camera, at the entrance, shows the words teamLab Borderless floating in space when seen through a camera from a set position. The words do not appear to the naked eye at the same spot.

Sketch Factory

Fish drawn in Sketch Ocean can be made into goods here: badges, magnets, hand towels, T-shirts, tote bags, paper craft, puzzles and stickers.

teamLab

teamLab has been active since 2001. It is made up of specialists in different fields, including artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects, and its work sits where art, science, technology and the natural world meet. The museum is run with Mori Building, its developer, with Epson as projection partner.