19^th Feb 2017 – Art Science Museum

“ArtScience Museum collaborated with teamLab, an award-winning Tokyo-based art collective of “ultra-technologists” that includes artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, architects and designers. The result is Future World – Singapore’s largest interactive digital playground.”

Looking back at the works, the first thing that came to mind was the extensive use of sensors throughout the different exhibitions, and then the coordination of information that was scattered, then collected, analyzed and then answered – all in the matter of a second.

As a Visual Communications major, the most I could do was tag along and listen to the third year Interactive Media seniors talk about the different software used, along with a handful of jargon thrown into the conversation, more or less lost through the technicality of it all. But one thing was clear, there was most definitely a complicated system behind the magical inflatable sound ball pit.

The one exhibition that stuck out was exactly that, but not for the exhibition and the great time I had running around with the kids in the ball pit. It was when we sat down to listen to team Lab-san that I truly understood how much I did not know. It was not just normal motion sensors that were in the balls, instead you had machines that detected gravity, movement, as well as to calculate speed, acceleration and position in the pit, all of which contributed to the sounds created. To think that all that technology was packed into one flat package, stuck to the surface of the inflated ball.