Art collective teamLab has revealed more details about the Middle East’s first teamLab Borderless museum, opening in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on 10 June. Located in the city’s historic district, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, teamLab Borderless is a collaborative initiative with the Saudi Ministry of Culture. The 10,000-square-metre space will be filled with artworks without boundaries.
Leading up to the opening, teamLab is working on numerous large-scale artworks and has now unveiled the massive creative, athletic space, Athletics Forest, alongside the co-creative educational project Future Park.
Athletics Forest
Athletics Forest is an innovative athletics area founded on the idea of viewing the environment three-dimensionally and through the lens of the body. Visitors completely immerse themselves in the interactive realm’s intricate and demanding three-dimensional environment.
“Humans perceive the world with their bodies and think with their bodies,” says teamLab founder Toshiyuki Inoko. “When you explore a complex, three-dimensional world with your own body, you physically perceive the world three-dimensionally and in turn your thoughts become three-dimensional.”
“We started this project, Athletics Forest, with the hopes to enhance three-dimensional and higher-dimensional thinking. Spatial awareness is said to be correlated with innovation and creativity. I grew up in a rural area and played in the mountains, but in today’s society and schools, the body is stationary. I think cities are surrounded too much by flat information such as books, TV, and smartphone screens.
“That is why we created a three-dimensional space that excessively demands the physical body. It is a space where people can perceive art with their physical bodies.”
Highlights include Rapidly Rotating Bouncing Sphere, a space made up of spheres that people can jump on. The spheres rotate at high speed, but when visitors approach, they stop and become easier to step on.
The spheres shine as people bounce on them. If they successively bounce on identically coloured spheres, the spheres will burst, and light particles will disperse over the area. Caterpillars are created when individuals jump on multiple identically coloured spheres in quick succession. If they continue doing this until the end, all identically coloured spheres will pop, producing many caterpillars.
Visitors can also enjoy the Multi Jumping Universe, a flexible surface on which multiple people can jump at the same time and sink or jump higher than usual. The ground beneath their feet dips while they stand on Multi Jumping, warping space and time. Stardust from the cosmos is drawn to this distortion, which creates new stars. Eventually, a massive, heavy star will transform into a black hole that engulfs all nearby stars and stardust.
Other artworks in Athletics Forest include Soft Terrain in Granular Topography – A Whole Year per Year, Aerial Climbing through a Flock of Colored Birds, and more.
Future Park
The educational initiative Future Park is built around the idea of co-creation or collaborative creation. Here, guests can freely build the world with others, working together to create endlessly evolving art.
In Connecting! Block Town, guests can create a city where trains, cars, and various vehicles run by placing connecting blocks on the table. The same type of blocks can connect, allowing vehicles to run along roads and train tracks created by the connections. The vehicles will evolve as visitors connect more blocks.
Meanwhile, in Sketch Ocean, visitors can colour in fish, which then come to life and swim around in the ocean around them. Sometimes, the fish leave the room, transcend the boundaries between artworks, and begin to swim through the museum. The tuna transcend the physical limits of the museum and swim out into the Sketch Ocean or Sketch Aquarium: Connected World artworks in exhibitions around the world. Similarly, tuna that visitors have drawn in other parts of the world could appear and swim into this exhibit.
A Window to the Universe where Little People Live is a window into the universe where little people live. Guests can create a picture by drawing lines with a light pen or creating shapes with a light stamp. Each line has a special power depending on its colour and influences the little people’s world. The shapes created by the light stamps appear in the little people’s world and start to move.
Visitors can also enjoy A Musical Wall where Little People Live, and A Table where Little People Live.
The immense teamLab Borderless Jeddah will comprise the Borderless World, Athletics Forest, Future Park, Forest of Lamps, as well as EN TEA HOUSE, exhibiting some 80 independent yet intricately interrelated works.
Earlier this year, Tokyo’s teamLab Borderless reopened in a new home in the Azabudai Hills complex.
