In Japan, digital megaliths emerge from the floor of an abandoned bath house, coming alive with animated flowers and water in a beautiful mash-up of light art, projections and abandoned places. Multidisciplinary collective TeamLab designed the work to continuously render in real time, so it’s neither pre-recorded nor on a loop.

The concept of the project is that non-material digital technology, i.e. TeamLab’s illusory projections, can transform nature into art without harming it. While “Megaliths in the Bath House Ruins” inserts strange illusory structures into an abandoned space, “Graffiti Nature,” another exhibit in the show, imagines local endangered wildlife as living graffiti. As seen in the rest of TeamLab’s work, the projections are interactive, moving and changing according to the way visitors move, so the show is never exactly the same twice.

TeamLab speaks of the bath house and its forested surroundings in terms of “space-times,” exploring the relationship of this particular exhibit to its larger “A Forest Where Gods Live, Ruins and Heritage, The Nature of Time” show.

“The forest surrounding the bath house ruins is home to 3,000-year-old trees, and it changes daily with the imperceptible, slow flow of time, repeating every year, as a space where the endlessly long time accumulates. The ruins from ages past scattered in the forest and the Edo-period garden which remains today each have their own respective space-times. The bath house was made in modern times, but after just a short period, it was abandoned, becoming a space-time where time had stopped completely. And this group of megaliths is also a mass made up of compressed space-times where the flow of time varies. Here, various space-times intersect and overlap.”

“Each megalith is surrounded by similarly standing megaliths, the space-times of which are all connected. Furthermore, these space-times are connected to those of other megaliths distributed around the world. Artworks move between the megaliths, traveling between the nearby megaliths in the same space, as well as through the megaliths around the world. The works within the space-time influence each other.”

The show takes place at the 500,000-square-meter Mifuneyama Rakuen Park, which includes the famous 3,000-year-old sacred Okuso tree of the Takeo Shrine and another 300-year-old sacred tree located at the center of the garden. TeamLab is particularly interested in the vague boundaries between the manicured garden and the wild forest, and between our current time and the experiences of the people who have interacted with the space over millennia.

As with any TeamLab exhibit, there’s a lot to see here. Check out the video of “A Forest Where Gods Live” for digital projections onto natural spaces within the park, and head to the group’s website for lots more photos, videos and info.

As if forests aren’t magical enough already, the Japanese art/technology collective Teamlab will be live-projecting their signature transforming visuals onto the surfaces of Mifuneyama Rakuen Park, giving visitors the feeling of being on an alien planet. ‘Forest Where Gods Live’ is a collection of individual installations with names like ‘Ever Blossoming Life Rock,’ Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and Boats,’ ‘Memory of Continuous Life’ and ‘Resonating Forest.’

“TeamLab is executing an art project called ‘Digitized Nature’ where ‘Nature Becomes Art.’ The concept of the project is that non-material digital art can turn nature into art without harming it. We exist as part of a process of eternal continuity of life and death, a process which has been continuing for an overwhelmingly long time. It is hard for us, however, to sense this in our everyday life. It was when we were wandering through the woods that we realized the shapes of those giant rocks, caves and forests, that have been formed over an infinite amount of time, are the continuous cycle of life itself.”

“By applying digital art to this unique environment, the exhibition celebrates a massive chunk of life that nests on such continuity. In Mifuneyama Rakuen, we got lost in the ambiguous border of garden and forest, and finally, we have come to realize we exist on the borderless continuity between nature and humans.”

Sponsored by Japanese beauty brand Shiseido, the awe-inspiring installation will be in place throughout the 500,000-square-meter garden located in the Saga prefecture July 14th through October 9th, 2017. If you can’t make it out there in person to experience the immersive exhibit firsthand, taking some time to delve into the individual pieces on the teamLab website is well worth it. The collective has produced a number of videos showing their projections in action, with descriptions of their inspiration behind each one.

The lines between three-dimensional objects and digital creations blur as projections alter architecture, sound stages and even human figures in real time. These projection mapping projects create an interplay between real and virtual space, often combining cutting-edge technology with dance and performance art

Hakanai: Dancer in a Projected Geometric Space

A solo dancer performs within a surreal cube with projection-mapped walls for ‘Hakanai,’ a performance at BAM’s Fishman Theater. CGI and sensors create a dynamic environment based on the dancer’s movement and location within the cube. Says creator Claire Bardainne of the show, “At the beginning it’s a word. Hakanai. It’s a Japanese old word, which denotes ephemeral, transitory, fragile, and everything you cannot catch. It’s the union of a human being and her dreams. It’s a show made of haikus that try to explain that word.”

Pixel: Surreal Reactive Environments

Pixel is a dance show with eleven dancers interacting in a virtual and ‘living visual’ environment aiming to combine “energy and poetry, fiction and technical achievement, hip hop and circus.” Created by the same people responsible for ‘Hakanai,’ it also invokes a bizarrely responsive environment with surfaces that undulate beneath the dancers’ bodies.

320° Licht: Light in a Reclaimed Gas Tank

Using the cathedral-like space within the disused Gasometer Oberhausen to its fullest advantage, this interactive installation creates new worlds within the 20,000 square meters available. “This experience is based on the vastness of the Gasometer. We tried to work with that expression to make the space bigger and smaller, to deform it and to change its surface over and over while not exaggerating and overwriting the original effect of the room.”

OMOTE: Real Time Face Hacking

A designer, a makeup artist and a digital image engineer came together to create ‘OMOTE,’ an eerie project projecting hundreds of different images onto the faces of live actors in real-time, continuously re-writing their appearances.

Projection-Mapped Music Video for ‘Save Me’ by Irma

Seven digital projectors change the environment around singer Irma on a single soundstage in the video for her song ‘Save Me.’ The process required Irma and her 20 young dancers to perform choreography perfectly in sync with the videotaping content.

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Eerily Altered Faces Spaces 14 Projection Mapping Projects

Actors gain access to thousands of different faces instantaneously as their facial topography is scanned and altered in real-time using 3D projection mapping. Japanese artist Nobumichi Asai collaborates with makeup artist Hiroto Kuwahara and French digital image engineer Paul Lacroix to create transfixing transformations that track the actor’s movements to keep their ‘new faces’ in place.

The Facehacking and Omote projects consist of real-time face tracking and projection mapping to ‘re-write’ the actors’ faces in a virtually endless variety of ways. As the actors turn their heads, animations are projected onto the surface of their skin.

The effect can be quite creepy, especially when these new characters open their eyes as if they have suddenly inhabited the bodies of their hosts. The result looks like especially detailed stage makeup, but changes on demand. While it could certainly be used in film, it’s especially intriguing as a possible element of live performances.

Churches are scrawled with ephemeral graffiti, public squares transmit profound messages and trees come to life with the moving heads of Cambodian deities when artists use digital projectors to transmit imagery onto urban surfaces. These 10 artists project words, classical art, geometric shapes, mirage-like fields of color or their own photography onto everything from Capitol buildings to screens made of water.

Jenny Holzer

American artist Jenny Holzer uses words on an unprecedented scale, especially with her outdoor light projections, introducing commentary to public spaces. While the words were her own from the time she started in 1977 until roughly 2001, she has begun working with texts written by others, including the works of great literary figures and sources like declassified US Army documents from the war in Iraq.

Clement Briend

Trees come to life in the sculptural images of deities and spirits from Cambodian culture in the series Cambodian Trees by French artist Clement Briend. Highlighting the nature that can be found within urban contexts, the series transformed the streets of Paris. Says brined, “Such nocturnal visions allow us to grasp the way magic profoundly influences how Cambodian people perceive the world.”

Luftwerk

Artist duo Luftwerk, made up of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, integrated Chicago’s iconic Cloud Gate into a light art installation called Luminous Field. The work used the reflective qualities of the sculpture to enhance and magnify imagery that was projected onto the ground around it.

Usman Haque

Commissioned by the City of Santa Monica for Glow 08, ‘Primal Source’ by Usman Haque was projected onto a large-scale waterscreen/mist projection system at a beach location near the city’s pier to create a mirage-like effect. The light changes in response to the sounds emanating from the crowd. “Some modes created ‘captures’ whose colour, shape and movement followed the frequency and amplitude dynamics of individual syllables and sentences picked up; other modes responded to wider collective phenomena, e.g. distorting a grid in response to the crowd volume, or creating a rush of wind through a wheat-field landscape.”

Paolo Buroni

Classic art comes to the streets for all to see when Italian multimedia artist Paolo Buroni projects images onto architecture in public squares. “I like to create change – to change reality with imagination,” says the artist. His works have been commissioned for events like the Venice Biennale and has appeared in Nuremburg,, Budapest, Istanbul, Paris and Seoul.

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Light Art Looms Large 10 Artists Project Illuminated Images