In Osaka, teamLab has installed an interactive sunflower ecosystem where the blooms glow and emit tones in direct response to visitor presence. In New York, Alan Michelson's public installation on Governors Island uses the geometry of Indigenous shell middens to make visible a history of the harbor that the official city narrative has systematically erased. Both works share a structural commitment: they require the physical presence of a body to complete the circuit. Neither can be adequately experienced on a screen. Both generate meaning from what you bring to them.
Presence as Medium and Message
The teamLab piece operates in the register of wonder: pure sensory responsiveness, the artwork as a living system that knows you are there. Michelson's work operates in the register of reckoning: the oyster as ecological and cultural archive, the installation as a demand that you stand on ground with a history. The gap between those two registers is wide, but the underlying design logic is the same. Both reject the extractive model of cultural consumption, where the work is a finished object and you are a passive receiver. A 2020 paper in Leonardo by Edmonds and colleagues on participatory art systems argues that presence-dependent works fundamentally shift the locus of aesthetic value from the object to the encounter.
IRL as Counter-Program
This matters against the backdrop of the Walmart-sponsored gaming site Restart laying off its entire editorial staff this week, another reminder that screen-mediated cultural experiences are economically fragile in ways that presence-based ones are not. You cannot disintermediate standing in a botanical garden when the sunflowers respond to you specifically. Mieke Marple and Francesca Sonara's ongoing argument for IRL experiences as a third-space counter to algorithmic culture finds an unexpected empirical confirmation in these two very different installations. The body shows up. The algorithm cannot.