Art Science Museum

Address: Marina Bay Sands 10 Bayfront Avenue, Singapore
Opening hours:
    Daily 10am-7pm (last admission at 6pm)

ArtScience Museum is a museum located within the integrated resort of Marina Bay Sands in the Downtown Core of the Central Area in Singapore. Opened on 17 February 2011 by Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, it is the world's first ArtScience museum. Although it has a permanent exhibition, ArtScience Gallery, the ArtScience Museum mainly hosts touring exhibitions curated by other museums. 

When I visited ArtScience Museum, I saw an exhibition called Future World.

 Art and technology collide in a spectacular way at Future World. The new permanent exhibition at the ArtScience Museum, on show for the next few years, features 15 installations by teamLab. Comprising over 400 members who come from backgrounds as diverse as engineering, mathematics and, of course, art, the Japanese collective are known for exploring how the natural and digital worlds interact with each other. So it goes without saying this show features more than canvases on bare white walls. The works respond and change according to movement and other forms of visitor interaction. TeamLab tell us more about five of the most eye-catching pieces at Future World.

1. Black Waves

 Black Waves is an expression of nature, rendered entirely in digital technology. It depicts the sea in the style of traditional Japanese painting. In the Japanese tradition, oceans, rivers and bodies of water are often represented as a series of curvilinear lines. The movement of these lines gives the impression that water itself is alive. teamLab have created this effect by calculating the interaction of hundreds of thousands of individual water particles, and then representing the movement of waves in a crescendo of white foam in a virtual 3D environment. Black Waves blurs the boundary between viewer and the artwork, and invites visitors to regard themselves as part of the seascape, thereby understanding that there is no separation between ourselves and nature.

2. Sliding through the Fruit Field

 Transiting from the Nature section of the exhibition, to the Town section, is a new artwork, that will take the place of the physical slide in Future World. Sliding through the Fruit Field is a playful and colourful interactive artwork designed for children that is projected onto a newly designed slide.
Visitors become a beam of life-giving sunlight, and as they glide down the slope, their energy is transferred to the fruit field, causing flowers and fruit to blossom and grow. As the different elements interact in the field, new seeds are sown, leading to new life.

3. Sketch Town
This installation is a depiction of a fictitious town, based on Singapore that includes recognizable landmarks, such as, ArtScience Museum, the Merlion and the Singapore Flyer. Young visitors use crayons and paper to draw a building, a car, or a plane for Sketch Town. When their two-dimensional pictures are placed in a digital scanner, they enter the town, becoming 3D animated objects. The visitors' urban designs become part of a vast projected city, which they can physically interact with through touch and movement, bringing the town to life. Touch a car, for example, and it will speed up, or change direction.

4. Light Ball Orchestra
Beachball-sized globes of multicoloured light and sound are your instruments in this electrifying, one-of-a-kind orchestra. Touch any ball to change the colour and sound of the balls around it, creating a resonating effect throughout this dazzling environment.
Enjoy creating a playful and dynamic space with other visitors, as their participation with the Light Ball Orchestra sends out ripples in different directions to interact with yours. Work together by pushing, bouncing and rolling the balls to continuously change the composition, color and sound of the orchestra.

5. Crystal Universe
Behold a seemingly infinite number of light particles inside the scintillating Crystal Universe. This stunning artwork is created with teamLab’s Interactive 4-D Vision technology and more than 170,000 LED lights, giving the illusion of stars moving in space. Move beyond the stars to encounter astrophysical phenomena such as planets, galaxies and even gravitational waves.
Find yourself at the centre of the universe, as the light and body of the installation responds to your mass and motion. Change the fabric of the universe itself by 'swiping' planets and stars from smart devices within the installation, and watch them become part of the dazzling environment around you. Surrounded by celestial wonders, reflect upon your own place within the vastness of the cosmos.

 

So far, I loved this museum. See you in another exhibition!