Flowers Bombing Home - TeamLab's Newest Project Brings the Digital Art to You

Over the past years, international art collective teamLab has become a household name in Tokyo, thanks to their fun, interactive exhibitions that innevitably look great on instagram (if anything counts as "insta-bae," it's teamLab). Their permanent exhibitions in the waterfront areas of Tokyo have been major tourist destinations, and their flashy new park installation in Saitama will surely draw crowds, but with people stuck at home (and definitely not traveling internationally), how are we supposed to enjoy teamLab from afar?

Well, teamLab's response to that issue seems to be the new "Flowers Bombing Home." Instead of an expansive installation of experiential digital art, this new project is a little smaller scale, while still bringing people together from all over the world. Draw a flower, they say, and you can watch it bloom before your eyes.

Intriguing to say the least. I gave it a try!

Leave it to teamLab, the process is really very simple and easy. First, you choose one of the flower templates from their website―right now you can choose from geraniums, globe thistles, balloon flowers, great willowherbs, and calypso orchids. Then you can color it in however you like, either digitally on a phone, tablet, or computer screen, or by hand (print it out and use markers, pencils, or your preferred medium). Then, you submit it, and the flower becomes part of an art piece being streamed continuously on the teamLab ART channel.

So here's my attempt! (What do you think?) I went for the simple geranium, and chose to scribble in colors based on the Japankuru logo, right on my computer. When you go to submit your flower, any clear image will work, so you can take a screenshot of your digital work or a well-framed photo of your art on paper, and throw it on the website. It's then added to "Flowers Drawn" page of the website, and put on the YouTube waiting list. As soon as my upload had finished, I rushed over to the YouTube streaming page and waited for my bright blue flower with anticipation. It didn't seem like too many people were uploading photos at that very moment, so when would it appear?

And then... there it was! And there! And there! And over there, too! Before I knew it, my flower was popping up all over.

Without too many other flowers being added to the stream to push mine out of the way, it slowly took over and melted into the background, turning the video stream into a mushy blur of blue and green highlights.

The concept of Flowers Bombing Home is clearly drawn from other teamLab pieces, like a room at the teamLab Borderless building (in Odaiba, Tokyo) where visitors can draw sea creatures and then watch them get added to an animation projected onto the wall, where hand-scribbled fish and squid bounce up and down in the water with the designs of friends and strangers alike. So it makes sense that teamLab would take the idea and both expand and compress it, reshaping it to work for a global audience with a shorter attention span. I can imagine that kids, bored at home with little to do all day, would love to see their art brought to life! It's entirely free to participate, so whether you just want to spend a minute or two sketching in some colors (like me), or make Flowers Bombing Home a project for the kids to spend an hour on, I'd recommend trying it out whenever you're feeling bored (and ready to color)!

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