Dear Ones,
On our first full day we plunged into a contemporary world of art and technology which reflected the deepest and most ancient teachings. I am going to transcribe some copy from our "Pilgrimage Companion" book about the exhibit. To know more about the place we visited you can go online to teamLab.
From our Pilgrimage Companion…
teamLab Planets Tokyo
Opened in 2018 as a temporary exhibition and repeatedly extended by demand, teamLab Planets holds the Guinness record as the most-visited museum devoted to a single artist or collective. It has become one of the most visited art spaces on earth. It is currently scheduled to run through the end of 2027. It is a collective of artists, engineers, mathematicians, animators, and architects, and their governing idea is stated plainly in their work: the boundary between the viewer and the artwork is a fiction, and so is the boundary between one artwork and another. They call the pieces here "body-immersive." You enter barefoot. You wade through water to the knee. You walk on a floor of mirrors, then cross a room filled with enormous spheres, and the space deforms around your body while your body deforms the space for everyone else in it.
The intellectual claim underneath this is not decoration. teamLab has said, in various forms, that modern life has trained us to move through flat, hard, rectilinear surfaces until we forget that the body has a consciousness of its own. The installations are designed to give that consciousness back to you by making the ground uncertain: water, mirror, softness, light that responds.
What to notice: In Floating Flower Garden, the orchids rise as you approach and descend behind you, so that you are always standing in a small clearing that exists only because you're there. In the water room, the koi are generated in real time and dissolve into flowers when they touch you; nothing is on a loop, and nothing you see will happen again. If you want a Dogen entry point, that's it: this one, unrepeatable, and then gone.
The resonance: Placing a digital art museum on day two of a Zen pilgrimage is a deliberate move, and a good one. "To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things" is not a metaphor here; it is more or less the operating instruction for the building. The ancient wooden temples later in the trip make the same argument with different technology.
My experience: It is hard to put into words. The exhibit asks you to surrender your body to the experience you enter and to relinquish thinking while, at the same time, maintaining uprightness and respect for the others immersed in the experience around you. Sound familiar? It is dazzling, mesmerizing, de-centering and brilliant. As always, here are a few images.
Descending into a new world. The practice of descending into the dark.
Wading through water that responds to your movement with beautiful and colorful movement of its own. Your colorful waves then interact with the waves of the others; mutual causality.
A cathedral of infinite points of light (long LED strings in an immense labyrinth with mirrored floors). You can't quite tell where the edges are and yet you are spellbound as the light changes and the perceived immensity of the space swallows you.
The spheres respond to your touch, changing colors and position as everyone moves through the space.
It was very difficult to walk in this room. You see people sitting or lying on the floor. The room was perfectly stable, but your perception was that it is moving. What is the truth?
Prehistoric animals prowl the forest in which you walk.
The living orchid garden you walk through rises up slowly in response to your slow walking, like kinhin, making space for you if you don't rush. The floors and walls are mirrored, so the garden is immense. It was Erin's heaven.
Resting and having something to eat and drink at the end. Not disparaging others ("glass houses!") and sitting at the Emptiness Table, being nourished by the world.
With palms together, Flint