teamLab Future Park Okinawa

teamLab Future Park Okinawa is a permanent exhibition in Naha, open since 15 December 2023 on the third floor of Galleria Okinawa. It is a teamLab educational project built on co-creation: people make a world freely together with others, and what visitors draw, touch and do changes the works.

teamLab is an art collective active since 2001. Its members include artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects, and its work explores where art, science, technology and the natural world meet.

Highlights

In Sketch Aquarium: Connected World, a fish drawn on paper starts swimming in a virtual aquarium beside other visitors' drawings. Fish scatter when touched, and touching a bag releases food for them. Tuna leave for the same work at teamLab exhibitions elsewhere in the world, and tuna drawn there can swim in here.

Graffiti Nature in a Beating Valley, a seasonal display, works the same way on uneven ground. Drawn creatures eat one another, multiply and die out as one ecosystem. Flowers bloom where people stand still and scatter when stepped on. Animals of Flowers, Symbiotic Lives, also seasonal, shows animals formed of the flowers of the season, which fall apart when touched.

Nature, physics and play

Other works turn scientific ideas into physical play:

• Waterfall Droplets: a single droplet bounces like a ball and many together behave like water, as water molecules do.

• Sliding through the Fruit Field: a slide on which water balls make seeds sprout and flower, bee balls pollinate the flowers into fruit, and fruit spreads new seeds.

• Hopscotch for Geniuses: Bounce on the Water: jumping along the same shape brings out fish, butterflies or birds, and along the same color spreads that color through the space.

• Light Ball Orchestra: rolling the balls changes their color and sound, so people make music together.

• Story of the Time when Gods were Everywhere: touching a pictograph on the wall calls up the world of that character, such as mountains, trees or birds.

Tiny inhabitants live in two more works. In A Musical Wall where Little People Live, stamps placed on the wall appear in their world, and they slide, jump and climb on them while falling seeds strike notes from each stamp. In A Table where Little People Live, they react the same way to hands and objects put on the table.

Sketch Factory

At Sketch Factory, a fish or creature drawn in the exhibition can be made into an original can badge, hand towel, T-shirt or tote bag.