Somehow in one day, David and I visited both teamLab Borderless and teamLab Planets. teamLab is an international art collective, and a pioneer of the immersive digital art field. In DC, there’s ARTECHOUSE, a similarly styled digital art museum, but it lacks many of the immersive elements of the original teamLab installations that I’ve been to. Digital Art museums have an interesting history, which slightly reminds me Hatsune Miku, a virtual pop idol with a software-produced voice. teamLab Borderless was the first, and many did not think a museum of random artwork projected on walls would succeed. Hatsune and Borderless are doing just fine. I can see where critics’ opinions come from, though. Sometimes, there are simple projections of color or stuff that are uninteresting and unfun. However, teamLab, especially in recent years, has been increasing the interactive elements, textures, and activities involved in their displays.
teamLab Borderless focuses on a boundary-less museum without a map where artwork gets up and wonders around, interacts with other artwork, and can occasionally be scared off by tall, scary visitors like myself. I enjoy that amongst the works of art that can react to movement and touch are physical installations of art, forests of light that storms can roll through, bulbs that drip from the ceiling. There’s a giant lily pad field you can move through, though I wish you could get more lost in it.
teamLab Planets is smaller and more intimate than Borderless, and makes use of the five senses. Your feet will get wet if you visit. The journey inwards begins in a flowing river, probably chalked full of chlorine, before moving into a large wading pool full of interactive projects of light and fish. There’s a similar room of lights to Borderless here with less weather elements, a room of giant colorful balloons and mirrors, a dark pit of hilly pillows to escape, and more. David and I found the water rooms and movable elements to be a lot of fun.
teamLab has Future Park and other installations that introduce your own drawings to their art collection or let you interact with the artwork projections in other fun and interesting ways.
Overall, I find the teamLab museums to be an enjoyable experience. I wish that they incorporated more seating to allow people to loiter and watch the displays change over time, and that they allowed more running, jumping, and climbing in the fully interactive rooms. I probably wouldn’t recommend doing both teamLab exhibits in one day and would spread them out. I can understand why people recommend Borderless over Planets, as the larger of the two, but I also really liked the water rooms of Planets.
What I really want is for someone to one day meld teamLab and the St. Louis City Museum together and create an art exhibit where you can climb the walls, dive in and completely swim through the rooms, get lost in the catacombs and have it all full of light, color, sound. That would be the day. I’d definitely travel thousands of miles for that.
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