At the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity unfolds as an environment where perception is stretched and boundaries give way. One of several new commissions, 26s Sea of Darkness, Memory Shining from the Depths casts a billowing, veil-like projection across a patchwork wall of hammered copper, its dark, diaphanous motion slipping over the glimmering metal like a curtain caught in a draft.
Founded by Toshiyuki Inoko in 2001, teamLab is an international art collective comprising hundreds of artists, animators, musicians, mathematicians, developers, engineers, and more. Long invested in the intersection of art, science, and technology, the group has been an early adopter of digital tools for experiential work and continues to build installations with basic software and programs widely available to the public. Their interactive, immersive environments probe the limits of human perception and imagination, sustaining a decidedly human approach without eschewing the digital.
Touch and light as compositional forces
Order in Chaos (2026) responds to physical contact, releasing vibrant trajectories of line that race across the floor, walls, and a grid of screens. Riotous and kinetic, the piece, the collective says, is an attempt to expand painting from a completed image, or a perspective illusion of space, into a spatiotemporal pictorial space that is continuous with the real space. In another register, Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity II syncs itself to its immediate surroundings: while on view in Chicago, the floral work brightens with sunrise and dims at sunset, its onscreen ecosystem shifting as fall turns to winter.
Irreversibility, preserved
The exhibition closes with The World of Irreversible Change (2022), a paneled digital depiction of a tranquil community that is programmed to transform if touched too many times. Excess taps trigger a year-long, irreversible state of war and bloodshed among its inhabitants. Several editions of the work exist, but the iteration at the Smart Museum of Art is the only one still in its original, pristine condition, and it is cordoned off for preservation. During a walkthrough, Inoko emphasized that once conflict begins, the community cannot return to peace; eventually the people die, the metropolis becomes desolate, and, after a few years, shrubs emerge and birdsong returnsbut humanity does not.
teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity is on view through February 21 at the Smart Museum of Art and also includes Massless Suns and Dark Suns (2022-ongoing) and Dissipative Figures Human (2026), alongside Sea of Darkness, Memory Shining from the Depths (2026) and Order in Chaos (2026).
