Expanding Three-dimensional Existence in Transforming Space, Free Floating
teamLab (founded 2001) · 2018
A room packed with enormous glowing spheres, each taller than a person, drifting gently around you and bumping softly against each other and against you. They are lit from within and change colour together, filling the whole space with a single deep blue, then flooding it with red or orange or a pale violet. You have to push your way through them, and as you do the spheres bob away, roll back and sometimes rise above your head before floating down again. There is no clear path, only a slow crowd of coloured planets.
Touch a sphere and it changes colour, sends out a sound and passes the colour to the spheres around it, so a single push can send a wave of new light through the room. The colours are chosen from a palette teamLab has used across many works, three flat colours and nine blurred ones, named after things such as morning glory, peach and plum. Each sphere is lightly inflated and weighted so that it floats free, neither settling on the floor nor escaping to the ceiling. Look up when the room turns a single colour and notice how the spheres seem to lose their edges and become one continuous space of light.
The work was made for the opening of Planets in 2018 and reworked in later years with new colours and behaviour. Its long title describes the idea plainly: the spheres are three dimensional bodies that fill and transform the room, and because they respond to everyone at once the space is always being reshaped by the people in it. It is the most physical piece in the museum and the one where visitors laugh the most. Small children disappear entirely among the spheres; keep hold of a hand.
Did You Know? Pushing one sphere sends its colour and sound rippling through the neighbouring spheres like a slow chain reaction.
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