The teamLab Planets art museum is a unique, immersive experience in Tokyo. You walk through various segments, each different than the last, most in dark settings but guided by various light setups.
One of the rooms is called “Floating in the Falling Universe of Flowers.” It’s a dome-shaped space with mirrored floors, upon which you can sit or lie down. Then, you observe thousands of flowers flying, changing, taking form and then dissolving, on the massive, singular, all-around screen covering the walls and ceiling of the dome, all accompanied by beautiful music.
A neat little twist at the museum is that the signboards describing the artwork only appear on your path after you’ve left each exhibit. There’s no biasing your point of view ahead of time. First, you experience, then you get the information.
For this particular one, part of the board reads as follows: “Flowers grow, bud, bloom, and in time, the petals fall, and the flowers wither and die. The cycle of birth and death continues for perpetuity. The artwork is not a pre-recorded image that is played back; it is created by a computer program that continuously renders the artwork in real time. As a whole, it is continuously changing, and previous visual states are never replicated.” Finally a good use of generative AI!
If you pay attention while in the room, you can notice it, of course. A big red flower floats by but never reappears. A bunch of tiny yellow sunflowers scatters, and you won’t see them again. Ergo, you could spend hours in that space, and you’d never be bored. The art is not only immersive but mirrors life itself: No matter how mundane or déjà vu–inducing the second that passes for you right now, the overall state of the world will never repeat in quite exactly the same way.
While you’re making your 8,000th coffee with the same push of the same button, somewhere, someone is driving on a highway for the first time. Someone is dying, and someone is being born. Meanwhile, someone else is pushing a coffee machine button for the first time.
I like it, this kind of art. It calls on us to be where we are. When we are. And it issues an important reminder, a reminder you can read in the last sentence on that sign at teamLabs should you ever have the good fortune of visiting: “The universe at this moment in time can never be seen again.”
