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In an era of blurring boundaries between technology and art, interdisciplinary collaboration has become a sign of the times. The exhibition “we are the future” at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMOFA) from May 27 to August 12, 2012, showcases projects by the Japanese interdisciplinary creative group, teamLab. A total of 18 works will be exhibited at the Museum’s Digiark and Bamboo Court. These works that combine technology, art and creative concepts, are an exploration of the new values that govern individual behaviors in the information era, while also revealing possible futures for societal development. The audience is led to explore extremes of creativity and diversity when technology and art are combined and brought into play.

The teamLab group brings together professionals from various fields in the information age: artists, editors, programmers, engineers, mathematicians, architects, web and print graphic designers, CG animators, etc., who attempt to achieve a balance between technology, art, commerce and creativity through teamwork and collective brainstorming. Their creative range encompasses animation, sound, performance, internet, fashion, design, and even medical science.

In the two 360-degree cyclorama digital image creations included in this exhibition, namely “100 Years Sea” and “Hana ha kurenai”, teamLab integrates modern technology with an extension of classical Japanese aesthetics. Japanese spatial logic, as understood by teamLab, is reinterpreted in three dimensional reality. The work “teamLab Hanger” was inspired by the everyday act of shopping for clothes. This work combines the function of a clothes hanger with images of the item of clothing it holds. When the hanger is picked up, different outfits with that item are modeled for the benefit of the user. This highlights how, in the information age, new interest and value can be created for everyday behaviors by using ingenious design and technological applications. In the work, Graffiti@Google, the ubiquitous search engine Google is used as a medium. Its search algorithms and search results yielded are placed side by side, like a paintbrush and a canvas – to explore the relationship between art and technological development.

The work of teamLab combine art and technology, bring out collective creativity, and reveal diverse development possibilities for a new era of artistic development. New values for interdisciplinary aesthetics are unveiled through unconventional, vivacious creativity.