Tokyo's Skyscrapers

Team Lab's digital mural at the entrance to Tokyo's Skytree, one of the world's monster skyscrapers, is 40 meters long and immensely detailed. But however , massive this form of digital art becomes-and it's a form subject to rampant inflation-Inoko's theories about seeing is based on more modest and often pre-digital sources. An early devotee of comic books and cartoons (no surprises there), then computer games, he recognized when he started to look at traditional Japanese art that all those forms had something in common : something about the way they captured space. In his discipline of physics, Inoko had been taught that photographic lenses, along with the conventions of western art were the logical way of transforming three dimensions into two, conveying the real world on to a flat surface. But Japanese traditions employed "a different spatial logic", as he said in an interview last year with j-collabo.org, which is "uniquely Japanese".