Forbes: Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle

If Tokyo-based art collective teamLab had its way, it would transform entire cities into immersive, interactive artworks that know no boundaries. Using light as paint and the entire world as its canvas, it encourages viewers to live inside its magical, dramatic and otherworldly digital displays, helping them to escape reality through art. Founded in 2001 by CEO and creative director Toshiyuki Inoko, 41, together with four friends, this 500-strong interdisciplinary army of self-proclaimed “ultra-technologists” uniting artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, architects and designers balances art, science and technology through a continuous process of collective creation and thinking. Its brand of digital art using lights, projections, motion sensors and sound aims to erase the lines between people, believing that art can create new relationships between visitors who share an experience, unlike a one-on-one relationship when viewing a painting or sculpture. Because its artworks transform depending on the behavior of a group of individuals and more special effects occur the larger the audience, they become more aware of other people’s presence.

Once Inoko identifies an artwork’s main concept, he gathers specialists together to refine the thinking and create the work, while the project goal and technical feasibility are defined progressively. Depending on the project, the number of team members involved ranges from six to 100. Having studied physics, statistics, natural language processing and art, Inoko says, “As a child, I was always interested in knowing what the world was all about for me, which included understanding nature and the relationship between humans and nature. This has now shifted slightly to my interest in learning what art means to me. What I’m creating now – digital art – is backed by knowledge from my scientific, mathematical and technological background, but I have always been interested in understanding the perception of 3-D space, how we convert that 3-D space into 2-D projections, and understanding spatial perspective and theory, which is very unique to Asian or Japanese theory and very different from the traditional Western perspective with a single vanishing point. I’ve learned a lot about the world by producing artworks and exhibitions, but it’s a neverending process that I will continue.” …Read More

Pictured: Universe of Water Particles on Au-Delà des Limites, 2018 | Teamlab