BEAUTY: Installation--"Floating Flower Garden – Flowers and I are of the same root, the Garden and I are one"

An art collective in Japan calling themselves teamLab have mounted a very magical installation called "Floating Flower Garden – Flowers and I are of the same root, the Garden and I are one," which consists of a room full of suspended, motion controlled living blossoms that raise and lower according to where visitors are moving.

"A floating flower garden filled with living flowers that float up and down in relation to the movement of people in the space.

When a viewer gets close to this flower-filled space, the flowers close to the viewer rise upwards all at once, creating a hemispherical space with the viewer at its center. In other words, although the whole space is filled with flowers, a hemispherical space is constantly being created with the viewer at its center and the viewer is free to move around wherever they want. If many viewers get close to one another, the dome spaces link up to form one single space.
In this interactive floating flower garden viewers are immersed in flowers, and become completely one with the garden itself.

Over 2,300 floating flowers bloom in the space. These flowers are alive and growing with each passing day.

Each flower has a partner insect and the scent of the flowers becomes stronger at the time that the insect is most active, as a result the scent of the air in the garden space changes according to the time of day, morning, noon, and evening.

Japanese Zen gardens are said to have been born as a place for Zen priests to carry out training so that they can become one with nature, the garden is a microcosm of the vastness of the surrounding natural mountain areas where they gathered to train.

There is a Zen kōan (a question or story that is part of a Zen priests theological training) called, “Nansen’s Flower”. A man named Rikukô Taifu, while talking with Nansen, said, “Jô Hoshi says, ‘Heaven and I are of the same root. All things and I are of the same substance.’ How wonderful this is!”. Nansen, pointing at a flower in the garden said, “People of these days see this flower as if they were in a dream.”

A person will become integrated with a flower when they look at a flower and the flower looks at them, possibly at this time the person will truly see the flower for the first time."

I love teamLab's "About" page from their website:
"teamLab is an Ultra-technologists group made up of specialists in the information society such as; Programmers (User Interface Engineers, Database Engineers, Network Engineers, Hardware engineers, Computer Vision Engineers, Software Architects), Mathematicians, Architects, CG Animators, Web Designers, Graphic Designers, Artists, Editors and more. We create works through “experimentation and innovation” making the borders between Art, Science, and Technology, more Ambiguous."

http://www.team-lab.net/en