Interactive Environment in First Digital Art Museum in Tokyo

World’s first digital art museum opened in Tokyo by teamLab, a pioneering interdisciplinary creative group of “ultra-technologists,” with offices in Japan, Singapore and China.

Called “Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless,” the venue offers a rotating display of colorful moving imagery that fills an entire gallery and creates an interactive environment responsive to the movements of visitors, Artnet reported.

“Digital art has been liberated from the constraints of material substance,” said teamLab founder Toshiyuki Inoko in a statement. “The feelings and thoughts that were incorporated into an artwork through a physical medium can now be directly transferred to the people (visitors) through experience.”

Works of the Japanese group in the huge venue include “Forest of Lamps” in which a tree lights up each time a person enters the room with a tea house serving green tea in cups that bloom with digital flowers.

Despite teamLab’s milestone in launching a digital art museum, this new realm of art is very much in the experimental phase.

Pace Gallery, which represents teamLab, is still figuring out how to price and sell the collective’s work. Small monitor-based works are one thing, but very few collectors have the space to display a room-encompassing digital art installation. Plus, building one of these high-tech immersive experiences can cost millions of dollars.

That is why teamLab built the museum, where they can sell tickets to see the work, as if it were a movie or concert.

There are 50 artworks on view, and while the museum is technically divided into five zones, many of the works blend seamlessly into one another.

Founded in 2001, teamLab seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, design and the natural world. Specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects work for the group.

According to Teamlab.art, digital technology has allowed art to liberate itself from the physical and transcend boundaries. The group aims to explore a new relationship between humans and nature through art.