An innovative and quite incredible new attraction has opened its doors in Tokyo, with the Mori Building in the Japanese capital hosting what is described as an unprecedented Digital Art Museum. Inside, visitors can wander freely through awe-inspiring lightworks that invite them to become one with the art.
The Mori Building Digital Art Museum is home to around 50 interactive works spread across 10,000 sq m (108,000 sq ft) of floorspace, divided up into five zones. The theme throughout is that there are no boundaries, with some works projecting out beyond their dedicated spaces and at times overlapping and even fusing with other installations.
One of those zones is dubbed the Borderless World, where visitors can clamber over the rocks at the base of a digital waterfall and wander through the ocean-like Way of the Sea exhibit. Here, lights simulate tens of thousands of fish, sensing people in real time and avoiding them, just as real fish in the ocean would.
The Athletics Forest is said to promote growth of the brain’s hippocampus with interactive installations built to sharpen memory and spatial awareness while stirring up emotions. There’s a giant trampoline covered in morphing images of the universe and a Light Forest bouldering exhibit, which asks visitors to climb up and around illuminated bouldering obstacles lodged in vertical poles.
Perhaps the most striking of the exhibits is the Forest of Resonating Lamps, where hundreds of multi-color LED lanterns dangle from the ceiling. As a person enters and stands next to one lamp, it starts to shine in a particular color. The light then spreads to the two nearest lamps and continues outward from there. If that spreading light encounters the spreading light spawned by another person, then it changes its tone to reflect the combined color of each.
Other lightworks on show include a tea house that serves a local green tea in cups that project flowers onto the brew, a slide made to resemble a fruit field, and the Sketch Aquarium, where kids’ creations are projected onto a wall that simulates a virtual tank.
The artworks were dreamt up by teamLab, a multi-national digital art collective, and are on show permanently at the Mori Building Digital Art Museum in Tokyo’s Odaiba Palette Town. For those that don’t happen to be in the area, our gallery offers a pretty spectacular look at the exhibits.
Tokyo’s spectacular digital art museum makes visitors part of the art [New Atlas]