These digital art pieces live on forever. But the devices that they live in have a shelf life. How then is the longevity of these works preserved?
Electronic parts are just a tool. Like how impressionist painters made paintings with oil on canvas. What they wanted to express was how luminous the world can be, and impressionism came at a time when technological advancement allowed artists to go outdoor to paint. Before, artists were painting oil paintings in their own studio based on the sketches that they did outdoors. But Impressionists were the first to physically take their canvas outdoor to paint thanks to the invention of oil tube. So it’s the same for teamLab. We are now living in an age of available technologies such as computers, screen monitors, and sensors, but over time, these tools may change. teamLab is not inventing or creating a new tools, they are only using available technology today. The most important element for them is the software. It’s like an artist’s drawings or sketches, or choreography for performance artists. These are what teamLab use to express their theories, digital solutions to eable creativity within PCs and digital files.

Now, I said digital file or digital art lasts forever because you can copy. It doesn’t degrade, there is no life limit. Since hardware for teamLab is just a tool, and every year brings new tools, the team will always make best use of that new technology. So when this kind of work is sold for collectors and museums and institutions, teamLab provides the software. It’s the main thing that the collectors or art institutions buy.

So there is some sense of ephemerality in the works. There aren’t many, but there are some people around me that see digital art as less than that of more traditional forms of art because of the medium. It’s accessible through screens, which give the illusion that you can access it on any other screen you own or have around you, which is probably why people reject or choose to place more value on works that don’t present with technology. It doesn’t really help with the surge of AI everywhere now. How do you make of this perspective?
When Mr. Inoko went from the very countryside villages in Shikoku Island to enter University of Tokyo, that was a time when the Internet became available more widely. He was a technology student, so he was very interested in learning about and developing a deeper understanding of the technology behind the Internet. But he wasn’t a normal student. He graduated from one of the most prestigious universities in Japan, with all the possibility of going into the real world with a good job. Mr. Inoko had no interest in going to prestigious global companies or banks. He instead to spoke to four of his friends to set up teamLab, all of whom are share the same thinking. He said, Let’s do something very different that no one else is doing. That’s how they started teamLab.

During the day, they were making programmes, products or applications for other people or companies to make a living, then at night they would gather together and make so-called digital work. That’s how they started. This laboratory of technically skilled, curious people.

That was in 2001?
Yes. 2001.

Around the same time that this was happening, I was moving from New York to Singapore, almost with the intention to retire. My first big exhibition here was an interesting show. I put a lot of energy and financial support, but it was really because I wanted to continue doing what I really wanted to do. Nothing to do with financial gain. I didn’t want to do art gallery as a business, so I was planning to curate a group show of computer-based art. Post-VHS video art came a generation of artists who used the computer — Mac or Windows — to create artworks. And at the end of my stay in New York, I bought many of those works for my personal collection. So in Singapore, I wanted to show, share these works with with the public. Then I thought, I don’t really have a more current work that can represent what computer-based art can be to today, because my collection stopped in the late 1990s. So I decided to invite teamLab to be part of my exhibition. They were completely unknown then, never represented by any gallery. So I had to go to Tokyo to meet Mr. Inoko, and was basically met with an immediate yes, on one condition.

One condition?
That I had to show whatever he wanted to show, with no ramifications or edits.

What were his requests?
I created a room slightly smaller than the corner we are in, seven metre square walls, about four metres high, projecting Kanji words falling down. When you touch each word, the Chinese character morphs into its meaning. So the Kanji or Chinese character of ‘tree’ grows into a tree with branches, and a touch of the character for ‘bird’ leads to birds flying to perch on the branches of the tree. It was interactive, even within the artwork. So that was my first presentation for teamLab. Of course, when I got the idea from Mr. Inoko, he wanted to create a circular room. Budget-wise, it was incredibly expensive to create a total circular room of eight or nine metre diameters. It is not my purpose to make money, but the expenditure still has to make some sense. So I said, “Okay, can we settle with square? And he said, “Okay, and but I also would like lots of equipment, projectors, sensors, and then I have to fly four technicians from Tokyo down to install everything.” So his team stayed for about 10 days to install.

And was the crowd better than expected? What led to the permanent ArtScience Museum show?
The work actually caught the attention of the director and curator of SAM at the time. They came and asked lots of questions. They had never heard of them before. I explained that they were not Singaporean and they are based in Tokyo, it’s a collective and not single artist. Then I helped to start the conversation that eventually led to SAM’s inclusion of a major teamLab work in Singapore Biennale.