I don’t know where I saw this advertised, but I saw an advertisement for the teamLabs Borderless exhibit in Tokyo before I left Colorado.  It is art created through light coordinated with sound and movement.  It looked interesting so we got tickets to go see it.  It ended up being more than interesting and was nothing short of pure magic.  I can’t say enough about it.  I’m not even sure I can come close to explaining how wonderful it was.  If you ever have the chance to see an exhibit by teamLabs, go!

It was a very popular art installation as the line to see it was out the door and around the corner.  It took a long time to get in, but it was so worth the wait. You are lost the second you enter the exhibit.  We were given a map so I knew what some of the areas were, but you couldn’t possibly follow the map once you are inside.  There were flowers made of lights spinning and moving along the walls ceiling and floor to the point that you really couldn’t tell where the walls ceiling and floor were.  There were elephants, giraffes and other creatures made of flowers walking through the hallways.  There were many little rooms with other things in them, but the flowers and animals still wandered in and out of these rooms.

A quote from their website:  “People understand and recognize the world through their bodies, moving freely and forming connections and relationships with others. As a consequence, the body has its own sense of time. In the mind, the boundaries between different thoughts are ambiguous, causing them to influence and sometimes intermingle with each other.  teamLab Borderless is a group of artworks that form one borderless world. Artworks move out of the rooms freely, form connections and relationships with people, communicate with other works, influence and sometimes intermingle with each other, and have the same concept of time as the human body.  People lose themselves in the artwork world. The borderless works transform according to the presence of people, and as we immerse and meld ourselves into this unified world, we explore a continuity among people, as well as a new relationship that transcends the boundaries between people and the world”.

There was one room where if you stood still, butterflies were created on you.  They started on your chest and back and moved to your feet and then flew out into the room and then fluttered out into the hallway and continued on to cover all reaches of the exhibit.  As long as people stood in this room, butterflies were created.  I had read that they continue to fly until someone touches them and then they cease to exist.

There was a room with a floor that raised up, covered in rocks made of light up to a beautiful waterfall in the corner.  You could walk up the rocks and sit on top of them with water made of light falling all around you and flowing out to the other corner of the room.

Another room was filled with lanterns that when you stood next to one, it lit brightly of a specific color.  Then the next closest two lights would light up with the same color and the next closest two to those until the pattern worked it’s way back to the original lamp.  The lamps were arranged in such a way that the line of light would always come back to the original lamp.  With a room full of people and different colors, mirrors on the floor, ceiling and walls it was impossible to follow the wave of lights you created, but it was mesmerizing.

There was a room that was called nest where you were supposed to lay on your back suspended in a nest while lights swirled around you.  We never made it to this one because of the long line to get in the room, but it sounded magical.

My favorite room was one where we entered the back of the room.  There were a bunch of vertical bars with round discs on them.  The discs were above our heads and light was being projected on them, but you couldn’t quite tell what the light was doing.  As we walked farther in the room, we walked upward and watched as the discs came more in line with our shoulders and then our hips.  At this point, it was a sea of color moving and swirling on the discs.  It went from walking through a field of waving reeds or plants to cascading colors and rivers of movement all around you as if you were standing in the field or the surf or the galaxy of color.  You slowly walked through, making your own path through the discs on poles until you were at the other side of the room where the exit was.  It was so unexpected that I loved it.  The room was called memory of topography.  That alone would have been worth the price of admission.

There was a room with led light strips hanging from floor to ceiling.  It looked like there was no rhyme or reason to it and that the whole room was full of these light strips.  They danced and moved to music, changing colors.  After a little bit, you could see pathways through the lights.  You walked through the pathways into other rooms.  Patterns would appear in the lights, they would light up like lightning and then go dark.  It was difficult to tell which way was up, where lights started and ended and they seemed to go on forever.  It was the very definition of magic.  This room was called Crystal World.

Ok wait, the tea house was my favorite room in the exhibit.  This was the only thing you had to pay for in the exhibit.  The description sounded interesting so we went in and bought tea.  We were taken to a very dimly lit waiting room until it was our turn.  After about 3 or 4 minutes we were taken to a very dark bar.  The bar was big and wide and could hold about 12 – 18 people.  Our waiter came out and brought us tea.  As the tea sat on the bar, a flower started to form in the tea.  The flower grew as long as the tea cup sat still on the bar.  Then when you picked it up to sip it, it broke into many flowers and scattered across the top of the bar.  Once freed from the cup, the flowers flowed out across the bar and floated up the wall when they reached it or continued on to the bar next to ours.  As long as there was tea in the cup, flowers formed and grew and broke apart to float around the room.  A guy sat next to us.  He had ordered ice cream.  As long as there was ice cream in his cup, vines grew out of his cup and wandered around the bar.  I wish I had paid more attention to the menu as I might have ordered more than one thing.  I didn’t want to ever leave, but as slow as I drank my tea, it was eventually gone and the bar turned dark again.

Here are a couple of photos and a lot of videos: