TRIPPY ART ALIGHTS IN MENLO PARK
With hackers and data breaches in the news, technology’s halo has been dimming in the public eye of late. But a group of Japanese artists who’ve plunked themselves in the middle of Silicon Valley are showing that if technology is harnessed for digital art, it can be a force for mind-blowing good.
“Mesmerizing” and “trippy” were the words used by hundreds of guests — whose ranks included former Hollywood studio head Michael Ovitz, Facebook’s Dan Rose and venture capitalist Jim Breyer of Accel Partners — at the opening night of “Living Digital Space and Future Parks,” a show at Pace Gallery in Menlo Park with a dozen works by teamLab, a Japa- nese collaborative of 400 artists (27 of whom traveled to install the show).
Pace president Marc Glimcher of New York presided over the evening with an assist by longtime friend and client Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, a Stanford philanthropy educator and author who happened to know a developer (her father, John Arrillaga) with thousands of square feet that were suitable for gallery space. The show is open through July 1 in the temporary gallery, which has scheduled programming through the year’s end.
Imagine a black room in which a viewer stands still, soon to be enveloped by flowers growing around her on the floor and walls, with butterflies flitting to and fro. Put too many
people in the room, and the plants die, as a result of overpopulation in the environment. Or walking through a passage called
“Crystal Universe,” in which 50,000 LED lights form a brilliant tunnel where lights change color as stars “explode.”
The immersive, interactive experience studded with lights is not about decor but is “real art, delivered in a new way,” Glimcher said, “and every time someone misses that, because of whatever their art threshold is, they live to regret it, like the people who made fun of Jackson Pollock or Monet.”
Artist Kudo Takashi said the work is meant to replicate the workings of the human mind, because “inside our head, there are so many ideas, and no boundaries … no boundary artwork — this is what we want, and what we do.”
At its core, said Arrillaga-Andreessen, the work is “the marriage of technological science with artistic creativity, which is the underpinning of Silicon Valley.”
A brilliant halo? “It’s as exciting,” she said, “as lighting a million candles.”