First Digital Art Museums open in Paris, Tokyo, soon in Jeju

In Tokyo, MORI Building Digital Art Museum, created by teamLab, opened in July, billed as the world's first digital art museum. L’Atelier des Lumières – Paris’s first digital museum of fine art - also opened this year, created by Culturespaces who plan to open a similar digital art centre on Jeju Island at the end of 2018.

The Atelier des Lumières museum is in a former foundry and is operated by Culturespaces, a French museum foundation that specialises in immersive art displays. This is the opening exhibition at what Culturespaces calls its “Workshop of Lights”, and its larger space, La Halle, is dedicated to Gustav Klimt and a century of Viennese painting. There are also works by Egon Schiele and Friedrich Stowasser, better-known as Hundertwasser. A smaller room, Le Studio, is given over to emerging artists – and exploring AI and digital installations.

The appetite is clearly growing for immersive art exhibitions: since it opened three months ago, more than 400,000 people have visited Atelier des Lumières. 

Tokyo's MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM has opened its doors and invites visitors to immerse themselves in its psychedelic installations. Inside the museum's colossal 10,000 sq m space, the first digital art museum in the world, patrons can literally get inside artworks and interact with them.

The exhibition was put together by Tokyo's collective of "ultra-technologists", teamLab.

Artworks are spread across the museum’s five zones and are designed to dissolve the boundary between visitor and artwork through interaction. Says teamLab: ‘Artworks move out of the rooms freely, form connections and relationships with people, communicate with other works, influence and sometimes intermingle with each other.’ Some 520 computers and 470 projectors power the digital artworks, which completely transform their physical space using animated graphics, colour and light.

Review of Atelier des Lumieres in The Guardian

Read more about the Mori Building Digital Art Museum