Today we slept in for pretty much the entire day. The lack of sleep finally caught up, and sitting up late working on this blog probably wasn’t the wisest idea. We got some quick food at 7/11 for lunch, and then ventured forth into Tokyo again to meet with one of our friends who has been staying here for the last few months and go to TeamLab Borderless together!

Forced perspective text, making it readable from this particular angle.

TeamLab

So, now you might find yourself wondering what TeamLab is. It’s a immersive museum / art installation that exists in several locations around Japan. I can’t speak for all locations since I assume they’re quite different, but the one called Borderless has a lot of digital art that spans several different “spaces” where the artwork is both interactive, and also moves around the entire space as you go around, so when you backtrack you suddenly find yourself in a completely unfamiliar, but samey feeling area which gives this really peculiar feeling of rediscovering something new. When we first got there we were pulled into a small room and given some basic info (I kid you not the worker said “Please enter this dark room” when he led us in there). There was no map, and we were encouraged to walk around and make our own path, returning to previous rooms to see a location filled with new life, and art you’ve seen before inhabit a new context. With that quick rundown over, we were given free reign of the exhibit.

Since there were so many things to see an experience I figured I’d comment on some of the coolest things I saw and experienced (and managed to take pictures of ofc!)

The Ebb and Flow of the Crowd

Pretty spirals made by yours truly. The very first “proper” room we went in to after entering the exhibit was this enormous room with a fake rock / hilltop embedded into one side. I’ve got some better images of it a bit further down when the people had dispersed a bit, but at that point the actual exhibit in the room had changed quite a bit. When we first came in there were butterflies and swallows flying around that you could interact with by touching them on the actual walls. The real interesting part of this moment however was the floor, which had these intricate flowing lines all over, looking almost like waves. After watching two Japanese guys experiment a bit, I (by them figuring it out) realised that the waves reacted to the movement of people in the room. When you moved around on the floor the lines would follow around you, showing the aftereffects of the ebb and flow of the crowds movement. After running around a little while to make all sorts of patterns we decided to split up and explore at our own paces, and thus I went running after a train of frogs I’d seen briefly pass by previously. I just had to see what they were on about!

Where are they headed? Who knows, I got sidetracked…

The Orbs

Hey look! There’s me! I headed after the frogs for a short while before I spotted an entrance in the side of the corridor, and intrigued continued forwards. After some queuing around (and interacting with some Norwegians who were right before me in the queue and were very happy to meet another Scandinavian) I got into what can only be described as The Orb Room. I took a photo for my new friends, and then continued around the mirror filled room. I met some of my friends here, and we goofed around quite a bit before heading on. This is the first place where I truly realised the scope and sheer volume of some of these instalments. There we maths formulas describing how the lamps were placed, and why they lit up in specific orders. Truly a magical place, but alas there was still plenty more to explore, and so I continued on.

These things were everywhere. Some almost touched the floor, and some were so far up in the ceiling you almost couldn’t see them

The Secret World of Arrietti

This makes you feel so tiny. The next thing I stumbled upon was a step into some giant plants of some kind, sort of as if I’d been shrunken down and made tiny, like in Thumbeina or Arrietti. I walked through this part a few times because I found it really nice, and as everything else it changed almost completely time to time. You start by walking among the giant stalks you can see here on the right, and then as you continue onwards the stalks shrink, and you start seeing the top of them, revealing their almost clover like tops. As you continue on further the area starts opening up into this wide almost field looking area, expanded in every direction by the mirrors on the walls, really giving an amazing sense of scale. It was incredibly pretty, and is a great opportunity to say that no pictures can truly do this place justice, and I can highly recommend going there. No matter which TeamLab location it is.

The mirrors make this expanse seem to go on forever.

Infinity ∞

It forms such pretty and regular patterns it’s hard to see what’s a passageway and what’s a wall of lights The second to last experience I really wanna talk about was this area absolutely full of LED strips hanging from the ceiling. It kind of reminded me of an old Minecraft world (Sky Grid), and just gives a really interesting feeling, sort of like staring off into infinity. This was also a more interactive experience than most, allowing you to play various “element” effects on the entire LED grid with an app on your phone! The effects were all really cool, but sort of hard to capture on video so you get this pretty still photo instead. This was another area that was really large and I actually managed to get lost inside of it, getting spun around and almost accidentally walking into a mirror wall that I thought was a passageway. Eventually I found my way into one of the corners which had a bit empty space, allowing you to stare into the wall of LEDs and actually see what all the effects did!

Rain

Looks almost like a waterfall! The final thing I did was to go back into the big room we saw the waves in the very beginning of the visit, to see that the lines were back, but now they were flowing down all the sides of the room, flowing down the hill like a little river or stream. This was the perfect place to sit down and recuperate a bit and try to gather some of our people before we begun heading out. We had booked a late time-slot, so at this point we were running out of time before the place closed.

When we had finally gotten everyone together and begun heading out there was one more little thing the installation had in store for us. A little poster perfectly surmising the entire place, and what I can only guess has to be the inspiration behind it all.

Have a free inspirational quote on your way out

Dinner

Tokyo tower sticking out between all the buildings Any good adventure isn’t complete with some food, and to the backdrop of Tokyo tower we walked around town a bit trying to find something that was still open. Eventually burgers were recommended, and we ended up at this American place and had some pretty amazing burgers and pulled pork and whatnot. This place probably had the best English speakers of the entire trip so far (I wonder why), and we left both full and happy, walking back towards tokyo tower again to catch a series of subways back towards our little apartment.

When we finally got home it was late late, but I still sat down to type this all out (mostly to fight with images tbh), and then eventually we all went to bed!

The burgers were really good, and the Coleslaw was perfectly fine.

Images are the bane of my existence and I need better tools to handle them properly, aaaaa

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