teamLab Research

teamLab undoubtedly opened a new era of art. It allows professionals in multi-industries to use the latest science and technology to create art, they are all popular for local audiences from Japan to the United States, from Italy to China, wherever they go. As a significant representative form of the trendy show and immersive exhibition, teamLab\u27s works are completely different from the past in terms of creative logic, exhibition experience, and collection methods. By going through the development history of teamLab, this article studies the characteristics of its exhibitions, audience, and the connection with traditional art, in order to explore the development of today\u27s art and look forward to the future of new art

Virtual Touch: Embodied Experiences of (dis)Embodied Intimacy in Mediatized Performance

In this dissertation, I explore a phenomenon I call virtual touch, in which embodied sensations of touch are felt through non-tactile senses. In the digital age, online interactivity has expanded the ways in which individuals experience connection, intimacy, and touch. Digital media, which have traditionally been thought of as disembodied, nevertheless have the ability to elicit intense feelings of touch. Through analysis of digital and virtual installation art, I examine the ways that non-tactile touch remains rooted in the embodied experience. The works I include in this study create a feeling of virtual touch through a co-functioning of the senses, and through what Brian Massumi terms “the superiority of the analog,” in which all experience is inherently rooted in the body. Grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the embodied subject, I focus on three broad categories of installation art, each of which creates an affective response of virtual touch through senses of sight and proprioception: telematic performance using video-conferencing technology, digitally reactive animations, and immersive sculptures of light designed to decenter the perceptual and visual senses. Along with works by artists Paul Sermon, Adrien M & Claire B, teamLab, and James Turrell, I include analyses of two research performances I created, Being Present (2016) and (dis)embodied in space (2019), both of which entangled live and mediatized bodies through telematic video technology. Each of the artworks that I include place an emphasis on the embodied experience, engaging bodies in interactions of virtual touch with other bodies, with digitally reactive artworks, and with light and space. Throughout this dissertation, I argue for a rethinking of concepts of touch, intimacy, and connection in the digital age

The politics of curating Japonisme: International art exhibition and soft power in contemporary Japanese cultural diplomacy

This article studies the Paris exposition Japonismes 2018, organized by the Japanese government to introduce the European public to the profundity of Japanese culture. It examines the organizational deliberations leading up to the exposition; the curation of individual exhibits held within its ambit; and the cultural politics of ‘Japan expositions’ that began with Japonismes and continue to this day. It argues that the organizers and exhibits in Japonismes make political use of the trope of a timeless, mystical, and animistic Japanese sense of beauty that supposedly unites prehistoric pottery and contemporary comics and animation. This Japanese aesthetic vision claims to provide an alternative to Western norms, thereby promising to resolve contemporary problems, such as anthropocentrism, by influencing Western aesthetics as it had in the late nineteenth century. Japonismes exemplifies how Japanese soft power diplomacy can employ Western tropes about Japan, such as Japonisme, for its economic and nation-branding efforts

Art-integrated pedagogy for English and Chinese language learners

The purpose of this research is to identify how art-integrated teaching methodology might help learners to absorb contents more effectively than the traditional teaching methodology. There are many schools in the U.S. started to use art-integration multimodal approach in school curriculum on different academic subjects. This research focuses on the art-integrated pedagogy in linguistic language, especially for English language learners and Chinese language learners. The researcher approaches the subject with illustrating a collection of personal cases about art-integrated pedagogy used in teaching and learning environment. This art-based research produces two teaching materials designed to answer the questions that were frequently asked in the researcher’s teaching and learning experiences, and they are the products of the process of finding the solutions. This research is hope to encourage language teachers to design their own art-integrated teaching materials

The Experience of a Lifetime: Interactive Digital Experience Beyond the Screen

Screen-based digital experience design is blooming among the local businesses in Metro Vancouver along with the increased pervasiveness of information technologies, new digital products in contemporary society. However, there are significantly fewer cases and related businesses around tangible interactive digital experience in which tangible objects and physical spaces replace the screen as the site of interaction. This thesis project aims to explore the specialties of the tangible interactive experience compared to the digital experience on the screen or in the virtual space. Additionally, the author investigates how to leverage user experience design methodologies in the process of designing an experimental interactive experience. In this practice-based exploration, the author prototyped four interactive digital experiences using different interactive technologies and tools tailored to different use case scenarios: 1. an interactive offline retail experience, 2. a “magical” and playful painting, 3. a room-scale interactive installation, and 4. an immersive meditation activity. These projects illustrate and explore the implementation of tangible interactions into digital experience design. During the development process, the author applied several user experience design methodologies in the projects – including field research, interviews, questionnaires, and design probes – to develop a workable framework designing tangible interactive experiences throughout the research project. The author aims to outline key implications of applying principles of user experience design to the field of tangible interactive environments. In the process, the author argues that tangible interactive design is indispensable in a successful and engaging digital experience, and thus worth investing in and exploring further in Vancouver’s marketplace

Selling Transcendence: The Rise of Experience and the Big Business of Immersive Art

There has been an explosion of immersive art experiences over the past few years. Even as the pandemic has taken a toll on tourism, immersive art ventures and experimental museums have expanded around the world, drawing significant crowds and offering investors an inside into a new, emerging industry. This thesis ties these new experiential businesses to the history of art through an analysis of immersive artistic exploration over time and connects the current forms of investment to the history of immersive art patronage. Exploring the relationship between major economic shifts and the development of the art market, this thesis explains the emergence of the experience economy and its influence on museum programming and artist practices. Finally, a discussion of the current state of the market and the key players that are innovating within the space for immersive art concludes this analysis

An Art Museum at the Intersection of Science and Technology: An Anthropological Approach

In recent decades, museums have increasingly implemented technology, both technology to better assist in the visitor experience and technology within the art on display. This research explores the possibility for a university museum and residency program that would exhibit art intersecting with science and technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Framed as an interest study, this thesis is situated in current scholarship pertaining to museum shifts of the 21st century and draws upon my interviews with interlocutors and participant observations. I make the case that community engagement, co-curation practices and residency programs can help museums be accountable and ethical to their publics. I utilize my ethnographic research to outline a proposal for a university museum and residency program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta

Illusion: Immersive Experience

Can society learn from art, and if so, what type of knowledge can be gained from art? It is currently understood that art and design can help humans explore, discover, and understand philosophical and imaginative topics. There is a general agreement that art can create insight and awareness in ways that logical and rational statements cannot, and from these unique interactions, humans can see the world with a new perspective (Worth, n.d.). This thesis will investigate the claim that art can inspire human imagination and allow viewers to gain insight into a surreal reality using designed, physically immersive spaces. Immersive art environments have the potential to make art-related interactions increasingly influential and meaningful. With the aid of new technologies, immersive art museums have strengthened the relationship between the audience, the work, and the artist by creating a deeper level of conceptual understanding and disrupting the border between them. These highly sensory experiences push viewers to explore a space thoughtfully, making it possible for guests to become active participants or even co-creators in immersive artworks. This new method of presentation allows an audience to fully experience the narrative of the artist (Hua, 2021). Literature reviews of immersive spaces will provide an understanding of how to design an effective art experience that will be interactive and educational. A second method of investigation will involve attending ongoing digital art installations, presenting an opportunity to analyze and document movements throughout space, the emotions evoked by the work, and interactions between participants. Immersive experiences aim to dismiss the physical and mental borders between viewers and works of art, engaging an audience’s sense of sight, sound, and touch. After a visit to ARTECHOUSE, one can understand that immersive art galleries also provide the benefit of transporting their visitors to a world that greatly differs from physical reality. In this new “world” guests are free from physical borders and can develop a new spatial awareness that makes users feel as though spaces extend past their physical areas. This deeply sensory experience makes it easier for visitors to absorb and retain knowledge from the content of the experience itself (Hua, 2021). The research conducted on immersive art environments, and their ability to impact humans and society as a whole, will drive the design of a new immersive art space. This immersive art space will inspire imagination and new ways of thinking

New relations in “post” era

As technology is developed, there become various changes in the world. And human is interacting very close to machines and technology more than any time. Philosophers have been criticising the modern concept of humanism to adjust to this new era. Artists are also one of the groups who react to it sensitively. In digital culture, humans become diverse forms and contexts, and this change demands the new definition of the human being. The existing boundaries of human and non-human such as, machine, nature are getting blurred and making new forms of relationships. These attempts can be found both in the words of philosophers and the practices of artists. In three chapters, the relationship between human and machine is discussed, based on various theoretical background and artistic practices. The first chapter contains two art projects of the author and deals with the new perspective of a machine and human subjectivity. In addition, chapter 2 of this thesis investigates how this new relationship affects the audiences and digital artworks in the museum. It focuses on relocated audiences who are positioned through media art. In the last chapter, by referencing non-human protagonists from pop culture who confront to the futuristic world, it explores the expecting problems and suggests to broaden the understanding of human and other species, to inhabit well in this “post” era