The World's First Digital Art Museum - teamLab Borderless in Tokyo, Japan
Stop everything and fly to Tokyo! There aren’t enough adjectives in the thesaurus to describe how much I loved this experience.
We all have a top 10 list of places we want to visit, and Tokyo held my coveted number one spot for years.
There are a million reasons to visit Tokyo but one that still finds its way into conversations a few times a week was my experience at teamLab Borderless, the world’s first digital art museum. It was life changing. You could literally feel the love, creativity, and imagination that went into creating this mapless interactive art world.
Mesmerized and overwhelmed with joy for 3.5 hours, I could have easily stayed 3.5 hours more if they weren’t closing. I highly recommend getting a day ticket, which sadly were sold out during my visit. There are 5 sections, with about 50 artworks spread out over 10,000 square meters on two floors. Everywhere you look and touch is magical, moving, and responsive to people around it. Basically, touch everything and be open to sneaky surprises.
These are a few of my favorite pieces:
Wander through the Crystal World, my favorite room, was positively hypnotizing. I was spellbound and starstruck and had to force myself to leave after 40 minutes. It’s an infinity room filled with floor to ceiling sparkling LED lights, surrounded by mirrors on all sides, set to a bright soundtrack.
Move through this room slowly. Hibernate in dark corners to fully absorb this luminous experience. Watch the lights change in wondrous curiosity, then do it again. And again. And again. It’s really truly so gorgeous.
The rhythmic pulse of Black Waves was relaxing and meditative. I curled up on a comfy bean bag to watch the waves crash and chase each other around the circular space. If I lived in Tokyo I would escape here frequently to enjoy this soothing visual lullaby.
Upstairs in Athletic Forest, movement was encouraged. I jumped on a squishy trampoline in outer space, surrounded by the vivid evolution of a star, from birth to death to stardust. Truly out of this world. On the other end, The Weightless Forest of Resonating Life had huge lit up balloon like objects that defied gravity and somehow reminded me of giant marshmallows.
Forest of Resonating Lamps was the line you waited in for 45 minutes to get the perfect Instagram photograph. Seeing these slowly changing, vivid lamps on Instagram’s explore page definitely piqued my interest and started my obsession with going to this museum.
Memory of Topography was a field of lily-like pads that grazed your shin as you walked through them. They cycled through rural landscape changes like summer rice terraces, playful fireflies, and spring cherry blossoms.
And then there was this room, which was about different 10 pieces of techno infused line sculpture and all I could think of was how much fun this light show would be at a great underground party.
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