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Tokyo, June 11, 2018 – “MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless,” the unprecedented digital art museum — jointly created and operated by Mori Building Co.,Ltd, a leading urban landscape developer, and teamLab, a world-leading digital art collective— finally opened on June 21. The digital art museum will feature approximately 50 interactive artworks, some completely new, in a huge 10,000 sqm area with five zones. The interactive artworks have no borders separating them from the other works. Some extend beyond their installation rooms and into the corridors, some overlap with other works and some even fuse with other works. Since there are no boundaries, the immersive works keep the boundaries between people in a state of continuous flux. Visitors physically enter and explore the works as well as experience interactions with other visitors. The result is a totally new kind of interactive digital art experience the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Ultimately, Mori Building and teamLab wish for their unique digital art museum to expand cultural interactions in Tokyo and enhance the city’s magnetism as the metropolis approaches 2020 and beyond.

Official website: http://borderless.teamlab.art/

Digest movie:

MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless (10,000sqm, 5 zones)

1. Borderless World

People move about freely in their lives, forming connections with others and experiencing the world through their bodies. The body also perceives the concept of time. The boundaries between thoughts are ambiguous, so thoughts can influence each other and sometimes intermingle. At MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless, artworks extend freely beyond their rooms, form connections with people and evoke perceptions of time. The artworks interact, sometimes influencing or even fusing with other artworks. The museum is a borderless world of such artworks. People lose themselves in this world through their bodies, and the borderless works actually transform in the presence of people. As people become immersed and meld into this world, they begin to experience continuity with others around them and form relationships that transcend human and worldly boundaries.

2. teamLab Athletics Forest

The Athletics Forest at teamLab Borderless is a new type of creative physical space that stimulates the growth of the brain’s hippocampus, where emotions and memory occur, and sharpens spatial awareness. Athletics Forest is based on the concept of understanding the world through the body and thinking three-dimensionally. Immersion in this interactive digital art with complex three-dimensional spaces evokes strong, physically creative experiences.

3. Future Park

This educational experience is based on the concept of “co-creative actions.” It is like an amusement park where children can enjoy freely co-creating their own worlds. The inspiration behind this interactive work is the desire to help children become more creative in their everyday lives by enjoying co-creative experiences.

4. Forest of Lamps

When a person stands close to a lamp in the Forest of Lamps, the light shines brightly to emit an enveloping color. Starting from the first lamp, the light spreads to the two nearest lamps and gradually the same light color is emitted by other lamps, one after another. Each lamp shines brightly once, then eventually the light returns to the first lamp. The process occurs in response to the interaction between a person and a lamp, so if a different light suddenly emerges from another part of the room, it means another person is in the room, making visitors aware of the presence of others.

5. EN Tea House

EN Tea is a new green tea that is grown and produced in the Hizen area near Nagasaki in western Japan. Visitors to EN Tea House pour tea into a teacup to create flowers that bloom in an infinite world inside the teacup. Visitors can also enjoy the experience of intermingling with this world by drinking the tea.

Messages from the Operators

Shingo Tsuji, President and CEO of Mori Building Co.,Ltd.

Tokyo must continually enhance its magnetic power to attract people, goods, capital and information from around the world. According to the most recent Global Power City Index, an annual report issued by Mori Building’s think tank Mori Memorial Foundation, Tokyo ranks very highly in areas such as economy, environment and livability, but is lacking in terms of art and cultural interaction. Mori Building’s urban development initiatives incorporate diverse urban functions. Our first major urban cultural development, Suntory Hall in ARK Hills, has staged a vast array of cultural events since opening in 1986. Our support for the growth and evolution of contemporary art also includes Mori Art Museum. We believe modern art is important because it reflects the modern era we live in. Now we have digital art, today’s cutting-edge modern art, which has been made possible by the rapid evolution of technologies. Mori Building actively incorporates educational opportunities in its urban development initiatives. Mori Building provides some 20,000 children with art and learning opportunities such as the Kids’ Workshop, mainly at Roppongi Hills, every year. Children require proactive, high-dimensional learning in the real world, but instead they receive passive, two-dimensional education in classrooms. We would be pleased if children could learn how to grasp things more high-dimensionally and expand their powers of imagination by exploring our world of digital art. During Tokyo’s exciting run-up to 2020, we hope everyone will enjoy this first and only museum of its kind, an unprecedented world of digital art created in collaboration between teamLab and Mori Building.

Toshiyuki Inoko, Founder of teamLab

Digital art has been liberated from the constraints of material substance. The feelings and thoughts that were incorporated into an artwork through a physical medium, can now be directly transferred to people (visitors) through experience. Unlike physical materials, people move freely with their bodies, form connections and relationships with others, and recognize the world through their bodies. The body has a concept of time, and in the mind, the boundaries between different thoughts are ambiguous, making them influence and sometimes intermingle with each other. If an artist can put thoughts and feelings directly into people’s experiences, artworks too can move freely, form connections and relationships with people, and have the same concept of time as the human body. Artworks can transcend boundaries, influence and sometimes intermingle with each other. In this way, all the boundaries between artist, people and artworks, dissolve and the world teamLab Borderless is created. As people walk freely around teamLab Borderless they lose themselves in the artwork world. The borderless artworks transform according to the presence of people, and as we immerse and meld ourselves into this unified world, we explore a new relationship that transcends the boundaries between people, and between people and the world.

MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless

Location: palette town, Odaiba

Address: 1-3-8 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo

Floor space: About 10,000 square meters

Launch: June 21(Thu), 2018

About Mori Building

Mori Building is an innovative urban developer based in Tokyo. The company is committed to maximizing the magnetic power of cities by creating and nurturing safe, sustainable and cosmopolitan urban centers based on its unique Vertical Garden City concept of high-rise centers for business, education, leisure and residence. The concept is applied in the company’s many leading-edge projects, including ARK Hills, Roppongi Hills and Toranomon Hills in Tokyo and the Shanghai World Financial Center. Mori Building is also engaged in real estate leasing, project management and consultation. Please visit www.mori.co.jp/en.

About teamLab

teamLab (f. 2001) is an art collective, interdisciplinary group of ultratechnologists whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, design and the natural world. Various specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects form teamLab. teamLab aims to explore a new relationship between humans and nature, and between oneself and the world through art. Digital technology has allowed art to liberate itself from the physical and transcend boundaries. teamLab sees no boundary between humans and nature, and between oneself and the world; one is in the other and the other in one. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous, borderless continuity of life. teamLab has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at venues worldwide, including teamLab Dance! Art Exhibition and Learn and Play! teamLab Future Park which has welcomed over 470,000 visitors; Expo Milano 2015 Japan Pavilion, Milan; Saatchi Gallery, London; Maison&Objet, Paris; the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung; DMM.PLANETS Art by teamLab which recorded 5-hour queue; teamLab: Living Digital Space and Future Parks, Silicon Valley; ArtScience Museum, Singapore; among others. Now exhibiting teamLab : Au-delà des limites at La Villette in Paris until September 9, 2018. The digital-only museum MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless in Tokyo launches on June 21, 2018. Exhibition teamLab: A Forest Where Gods Live at Mifuneyama Rakuen in Saga, Japan opens on July 20, 2018. 7 teamLab’s works are in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Asia Society Museum, New York; Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

teamLab: https://www.teamlab.art/

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