Translator: Yoshie Asahara Reviewer: Riaki Poništ
I direct a company called teamLab.
teamLab is a collective of engineers, programmers, designers,
CG animators, architects, and mathematicians.
Our company is made up of these specialist practitioners.
Moving beyond our own fields of expertise, we think and invent together.
We go through this process in order to produce artworks.
We merge science, technology, art and design,
and obscure their boundaries.
Putting experiment and innovation at the heart of our projects,
we aim to gain insights into the future through our creative activities
or through processes of creation.
We started up teamLab with the concept
that technology and creativity are most important in society.
Today, I'm going to talk about what I feel in my daily life
and what I've found through our activities;
specifically, that creativity in individuals and society
exists in our rich Japanese culture more than we recognize.
That's what I'll be talking about today.
In today's information society,
information is shared more rapidly than ever.
In some domains that can be verbalized or that can be logically expressed,
the speed of sharing is greatly intensified,
leveling the playing field in those industries.
Meanwhile, there is a domain where we've seen more competition,
and we call it a highly culturally dependent domain.
This domain works on your subjective views:
cool, cute, comfortable or funny.
In other words, creative methodologies in this culturally highly dependent domain
cannot be described verbally or logically,
which means they're inherently difficult to share.
I believe that it's this unsharability that leads to more competition,
hence differentiation in the market.
On that note, what we aim to do at teamLab
is to unravel the culture in our society through our activities.
By "culture," I don't mean the forms of culture that we can ostensibly observe
but the underlying parts of it:
How is the world viewed?
How is the world recognized?
We want to clarify these questions,
and that's what drives us to create our artworks.
Through the production process,
we aim to gradually unravel the underlying parts of Japanese culture.
What we make is animation,
like Japanese style paintings.
Or, visual artworks like this.
I will tell you why we started this.
Before Westernization,
Japanese people viewed the world differently than they do now.
Their perception of landscape and the world
was probably different from that of people today.
It is often said Japanese paintings are not 3D but flat, or 2D,
but that is for modern people.
Premodern Japanese people did see a three-dimensional space in their art.
People in those days saw space in Japanese paintings as 3D
in the same was as people today see a photo in 3D now.
Furthermore, they saw the world as shown in Japanese style paintings.
I would go so far as to say
that just as Western paintings use perspective,
Japanese paintings have their own structure
to logically recognize space, differently from perspective paintings.
We have explored such a logical structure, and we call it "ultra-subjective space."
We use it as the basis of our artworks.
Specifically, we create a space digitally, like this.
Then, we also create all other 3D objects within it.
I said "create a space," but look.
This is a space on a computer seen in perspective view.
When a space is shown on the screen, the space can't be depicted.
So, some logical formula transforms it to 2D
to put it on display.
It's a digitally created space seen with the perspective method.
Using the Japanese structure of space, which we have explored and established,
we transform a space to 2D, like this.
I am showing you the same space in two ways.
This is seen with perspective view.
This is with Japanese spatial view.
That was an example of how we create visual artworks
by logically making a space flat,
based on our "ultra-subjectivity" theory.
In our exhibition, we show visitors these artworks.
What happens to me there all the time
is that visitors come to me and ask me questions like
"How many layers do you use to create your animation?"
I know that people often think
my Japanese is poor or broken or hardly understood
because that's how people comment on me on the internet.
And it makes me sad to know my spoken Japanese is so poor
that others don't understand what I'm trying to say.
When I say, "We create a space logically," people tend to give me a blank reply
and quickly go back to,
"But how many layers do you actually use to create your animation?"
I'm like, "Seriously, didn't he hear what I just said?!"
But then when I step back and reflect on what we created,
I can see that our artworks,
logically structured spatial creations, do seem to be layered.
It is as if we used layers to depict them.
That made me wonder:
Does the Japanese spatial view
make the world look as if there are layers?
Could it be even said
that premodern Japanese people saw the whole world in layers?
Since then, everything has started connecting.
If someone views the world in layers,
when they design a space,
its structure would be layered because the world is seen as layered.
So, the spaces premodern Japanese people designed space in layers.
This is a typical Japanese garden.
It has a layered structure including a "borrowed scenery,"
or an incorporated background landscape, which is used as a single layer
despite its real breadth and depth.
In contrast, in the West,
I believe people have always seen the world with a perspective view,
and therefore, people designed spaces with a perspective method.
This is a typical Western garden.
You can see it's designed with a perspective view.
In perspective, a space is seen from a vantage point,
so when the point moves horizontally, the space and the effect get distorted.
So, movement paths tend to converge
to the vanishing point in straight lines, like this.
Oppositely, if viewers of a layered space go forward, its design will be distorted,
so they can't do that.
But they can freely move horizontally in a layered space
because no vanishing point exists.
Due to the horizontal freedom, they are used to moving side to side.
In short, spatial design dictated people's motion,
and it differentiated people's worldview.
So in the West, historically, people have been front-view oriented
in relation to their own movements,
while in Japan, in the past,
people's awareness was focused on their sides, as I see it.
Let me digress for a moment.
This is Super Mario Bros., my favorite video game.
Actually, Super Mario Bros.
is the first game in the world which used side-scrolling actions,
which made it a huge hit all around the world.
A lot of people regard the creator of Mario as an incredible genius
and worship him as a "god" in the industry.
Now, if you think about this guy,
he is actually based in Kyoto,
and it's home to many traditional spaces designed with traditional spatial views.
Maybe the creator, in his daily life, perceived the world horizontally
because spaces in Kyoto had been designed with layers.
If that was what he saw every day,
it might be that he just copied it into the world of computer games.
The Mario game is often referred to as 2D.
Actually, its background is designed with layers.
If you ever played this game in your childhood,
it may have felt as if Mario was running around in a space,
the kind of experience you would've had as a child.
I'm going to switch the topic back.
This is "Views in and around Kyoto,"
a famous, typical Japanese picture.
This is the game Dragon Quest.
Again, Super Mario Bros.
They may seem completely unrelated,
but actually, they're all on a 2D plane based on the same spatial recognition.
My colleagues and I assume
that all three have the very same logical structure of spatial recognition.
Here, there is a ladder and a bridge next to it.
School teachers wouldn't like this picture.
But in terms of Japanese spatial recognition,
these objects are correctly depicted.
I've talked about Japanese spatial view and its logical structure repeatedly.
But, let's think further.
To make it easier, let's review the Western perspective view.
You might already understand it, but let me go over it again.
This is a picture of some famous middle-aged matron.
(Laughter)
As you can see, it was drawn with a perspective view
because it's a Western style painting.
Perspective can be explained like this:
The blue figure here is the painter's vantage point,
and the light blue triangle is the space in his view.
The matron's vantage point is the red figure.
She is standing in the center of the painter's view.
So that's the situation which the painter replicated
in 2D using the perspective method into the painting of the matron.
Now, while looking at the picture, let's imagine that you were her.
I know you don't really want to be this lady,
but let's give it a go.
Once you adopt her view,
what we would all see from our vantage point is the pink area.
When you are her, your view is the pink area.
In other words, your view would change if you became a character in a picture.
It's quite obvious, isn't it?
Let's look at Japanese paintings again.
This is a classic, typical Japanese painting.
How was the space in it perceived at that time?
In Japanese painting, in my opinion, a "vantage point" almost doesn't exit.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume it does.
So the vantage point here is where the blue guy is.
What he is seeing is the square area in light blue,
and the scene he sees is the painting on the left.
It might be hard for you to believe someone would view the world like this.
But maybe he does.
Your view might have been warped by Western civilization.
In reality, human eyes don't see like this.
They can only focus on extremely narrow and shallow areas.
See, when you focus on my face, you aren't seeing the screen.
Or, when you focus on my face, you aren't seeing others in front of you.
They're in your view, but you don't see them.
That proves my point:
our eyes can only focus on areas much narrower and shallower than we realize.
But you don't feel your view is so narrow and shallow.
Why?
Because we have another dimension called "time."
Your visual focus often moves around, so you recognize many things.
In a limited time axis, your brain works hard
to logically synthesize the narrows and shallows you've recognized.
The logical structure makes you see using perspective mode.
That's the reason why you feel
a scene in front of you looks like a photo
and why you perceive a space when seeing a photo.
Does that make sense?
So if this is a worldview synthesized by your brain,
it's not completely implausible that people viewed the world like that.
You may not be entirely convinced,
but let's assume it was true for the premodern Japanese.
The blue guy views the squared space,
which is the scene in the picture above.
Assuming that, look at the man with a black costume in the picture.
His position is not exactly the same,
but let's simplify and assume he is the red guy in the right one.
The red guy exists in the light blue space,
which is the scene depicted in the picture above.
While watching the picture, imagine that the man dressed in black is you.
The scene you can see as the man is this pink section.
This section is what the man saw.
See, these guys' views are almost same.
What I'm trying to say is this:
even if you adopt the view of a character in a picture you're looking at,
what you would see is almost the same.
Or, even if you become a character in a picture you're looking at,
you can still keep looking at the picture as you.
Remember Mona Lisa.
Once you took her view, you couldn't see her anymore.
But, this allows you to look at the picture
and get into it at the same time because what you see doesn't change.
Let me come back to Dragon Quest.
I played it when I was a child.
I was ecstatic every time my character leveled up.
It was as if I'd done it myself.
In fact, it was more than "as if." To me it was my own achievement.
A video game is different from a movie.
It needs the player to "control."
Controlling a game means
the player needs to look at the screen objectively
and recognize where the characters are and their objective locations
in order to decide which way to go next.
To do this, the player needs to keep seeing a picture as a picture.
Despite that, I got really excited every time my characters leveled up,
meaning I was able to keep looking at the screen objectively
while I played the character subjectively.
Oppositely, with the perspective view,
playing a character means you lose the holistic view.
As a result, the character's figure is out of your sight.
This is a typical American computer game.
In those kinds of games,
you only get to see a gun, a steering wheel or the cockpit.
It may sound exaggerated, but my theory is this:
methodologies of spatial expression our ancestors developed
over the course of history
may well have been implicitly passed down to modern Japanese,
and this Japanese spatial concept was applied successfully
in depicting the world of interactive computer games,
which is why, back in the day,
Japanese computer games could attract people all over the world.
What I wanted to tell you
is that creativity is established on a cultural foundation
far beyond our thoughts and the abilities of individuals.
It is rooted on our rich cultural ground.
In the long course of history,
culture is continuously passed down, implicitly and non-verbally,
creating innovation along the way.
In other words,
continuation of cultural innovation means sustaining the culture,
and innovating and sustaining the culture
begets the creativity of individuals or society.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)