In a small, glass-fronted side office, the window is propped open to let in the humid air. On the wall outside, teamLab’s logo is engulfed by a chain of stylised, red-andblack fish that leap from floor to ceiling. The carpet is dotted with cartoons of flowers, trees, waves and stars. A clutch of employees sit around a table, laptops on knees, talking quietly. Kudo takes a drag on a cigarette and pours a glug of milk into a coffee cup. “We’re an art collective, but at the same time we call ourselves an ultra-technologists group. It’s kind of a joke,” he says with a laugh that chirps and crackles. ”There is no point in individual names. I have no interest in my job name.” His business card lists him as communications director, but in reality Kudo sees his work as like “oxygen” – because nobody can communicate without oxygen, he says. Dressed in a long black coat, creased grey T-shirt and baggy black trousers, Kudo has a near-perpetual smile and defies description. In his twenties, he lived on the streets of Damascus and Beirut for six years, making what money he could as a fire-breather. “This one is from 2002, when I left Japan,” he says, grabbing a long, matted ponytail that’s draped over his left shoulder. “I lost half of it – it already died and suddenly it fell off.” In 2010, after a brief stint as a video-game magazine editor in Stockholm, Kudo felt the urge to return to Japan. When he did, he looked up Toshiyuki Inoko, an old friend and the mercurial founder of teamLab. Inoko, also 40, founded teamLab with four university friends. “I had never worked for a Japanese company, this was my first,” says Kudo, who is now settled in Japan with a wife and children. While Kudo is gregarious and energetic, Inoko is guarded almost to the point of being aloof. He types on his laptop, excitedly showing me YouTube videos of teamLab’s recent exhibitions. “People can live inside art, it’s not just decoration. That’s what we want to do,” he says, gesturing at a video of an installation that connected people’s smartphones to a series of outdoor projectors. It’s typical of teamLab’s work: an ingenious mix of technology and design that lets people beam epic-scale kanji symbols and flowers on to a nearby building. With a flick of a finger on a screen, Kudo explains, the mundane was made magical.
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hen I visit teamLab’s offices, Inoko is in Singapore, overseeing the opening of an exhibition at the city-state’s National Gallery. For the piece, titled Homogenizing and Transforming World, teamLab has filled a vast room with 150cm-wide balls. In the middle of each is a tiny colourchanging light and a sensor, with all the balls in the room connected to one another. When someone walks into the room and pushes one ball on to the next, the colour of the first is passed on, creating a bumping, rippling effect. Fill the room with people and colours start changing in every direction. “It’s the same concept as the internet: you can change the world, but other people can also change the world,” Kudo says, as we wait for Inoko to join us on Google Hangouts. When he appears on-screen, Inoko looks dishevelled. He frowns into the camera on his laptop and puffs lazily on a cigarette. Sat on the balcony of his hotel, the hum of traffic fills the long, thoughtful pauses he takes between utterances. “The process to create is based on diversity,” he says after two minutes of silence. “Normally when you create something you can only use it once, but through the process we find many things. This is a key value of teamLab. At teamLab we are making art, but through our creativity, we always try to find a way to reuse intelligence.”
Diversity, process and intelligence are important mantras for Inoko. He describes teamLab’s creative output as the result of what he calls “co-intelligence” of working in teams to take one person’s concept and turn it into a sprawling work of art. It’s a process that leans heavily on Inoko’s degree in physics and the scientific process: identify a problem, hypothesise and repeat until you discover a new kind of artistic creation. teamLab’s work is brought about by a coalescence of art and technology. The company hacks together sensors, projectors, screens, animations and lights to create dazzling displays in which the technology effortlessly fades into the background. “Every day we create something and through the process we build up co-intelligence. Then we can make another artwork. And another concept,” Inoko says, pausing thoughtfully once more. “Inspiration doesn’t suddenly happen. We have a lot of specialists and when they work in teams they are cothinking. They’re not only thinking of their own territories, but over their boundaries, thinking together with other people.”
Above and left: TeamLab’s office is littered with the detritus of previous projects