Lose Yourself in an Interactive Garden of Digital Butterflies

Japanese art collective teamLab has a penchant for placing flowers within their installations, room-sized experiences that often pit immersive digital projections in architecturally-specific settings. For their latest, Flutter Of Butterflies Beyond Borders, teamLab takes over London’s Saatchi Gallery for the START Art Fair (which opens September 10), pairing virtual flowers with swarms of digital butterflies.

As noted on teamLab's website, the collective projects a glowing, psychedelic array of flowers and butterflies inside a mirrored walkway. To create Flutter Of Butterflies Beyond Borders, the collective digitally rendered a year’s worth of seasonal bloom and decay, all of it responsive to viewers' activities within the mirrored hall.

Flutter Of Butterflies Beyond Borders comprises two of teamLab’s previous installations, Ever Blossoming Life II – A Whole Year Per Hour, Dark, and Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year. These projections are overlaid onto one another to create a virtual hall of mirrors full of digital organisms.

“Attendees’ presence will affect their cycle and whether they wither, die, spring up and blossom, [u]ltimately exploring the boundary between nature and human behaviour,” teamLab says. “The gallery space sees butterflies flying across its walls, onto the floral imagery that looks at art being released from its constraints by the digital domain.”

A computer program built by teamLab creates the real-time interactivity. “[T]he visuals of the winged insects are not pre-recorded or played back, but continuously changing, never to be repeated,” teamLab explains.

START Art Fair kicks off September 10th and runs to the 13th.

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