Augmented-space, Assemblages and Art
Yesterday I went to “Teamlab Borderless”, a digital art extravaganza located in the “entertainment” quarter of Tokyo. Inside a 6 storey parking-lot/shopping-mall type of building, nestled beneath the “Giant Sky Wheel in Palette Town” and next to the Megaweb Toyota City Showcase. I lined up for 40 minutes even though I had bought tickets online.
It’s two floors and there are different spaces and rooms. The “borderless” part is the way that the artworks move around the spaces. Some rooms are pretty much set because they’re custom made with harware or architectural features, like an uneven floor, trampolines and slides. In most places you and interact with the projections that don’t feel like projections. You don’t get projections on your body when you stand in front of the wall, and you don’t cast a shadow onto any surface. I couldn’t work out how they do that - probably a combination of oblique angles and projections of the same thing from different angles. The effect is much like AR but, of course, there’s no head-gear.
Today I put three thoughts together for the first time:
- Augmented-space
- Assemblage
- Complexity
Augmented space is what we get when we mix digital technology and the physical world. An assemblage is a combination of things that is more than the sum of it’s parts. A complex system is a network of things, loosely coupled, that exhibits emergent behaviours. Augmented space is an assemblage with which we can work if we follow the principles of complexity theory.