Waterfall of Light Particles at the Top of an Incline
teamLab (founded 2001) · 2018
The first artwork is one you walk through with bare feet. After the lockers the route narrows into a dark corridor that rises in a gentle slope, and water runs down it towards you over a textured floor. Onto the water and the walls a waterfall is projected, a torrent of white and blue light particles that pours down the incline, breaks around your ankles and streams away behind you. The sound of real water and the image of projected water are so closely matched that most people stop for a moment to work out which is which.
teamLab has been making digital waterfalls since its earliest years, and the technique is worth knowing. The water in the projection is not a video but a simulation: the software models the fall of hundreds of thousands of particles in a virtual three dimensional space, calculates how they would flow over the shape of the slope, and then draws the lines of their movement, in the manner of the flowing lines of traditional Japanese painting. The result looks both like a photograph of water and like a brush drawing of it. Watch your own feet as you climb, the particles part around them.
The piece has a practical purpose as well as a poetic one. The museum wants its visitors to feel the works through the whole body, and the soles of the feet are the most neglected sense in ordinary life. Walking up a shallow river in the dark makes you attentive to every step before you have seen a single mirror or light. It was part of Planets from its opening in 2018 and has remained the first thing every visitor encounters. At night the entrance outside is lit with a similar cascade of light, which is how many people first see the museum from the street.
Did You Know? The projected waterfall is a live simulation of particles, not a video, so it never loops in exactly the same way.
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