Japan's Mifuneyama Rakuen historic park. Image credit: teamLab
Japanese cosmetics brand Shiseido is supporting an innovative project that using nature as fine art without hurting the environment.
Luxury brands look to both the art world and advanced technology to create high-end experiences that wow their affluent consumers. Shiseido’s latest sponsorship looks to both of these sectors as it supports teamLab’s most-recent art exhibit.
Digital in nature
Mifuneyama Rakuen Park is the inspiration and subject of teamLab’s special art exhibit, sponsored by Shiseido. The 172-year old park located in Japan is home to the country’s seventh largest sacred Okusu tree of Takeo Shrine and a garden created by the country’s ancestors.
“Digitized Nature” is teamLab’s art project that turns the historic park into a technological art piece.
The exhibit, named “A Forest Where Gods Live," runs from July 14 to Oct. 9 and takes place in the historic forest. A series of digital installations turn nature into moving digital art.
For instance, the installation “Ever Blossoming Life Rock” projects a year of seasonal flowers blooming and scattering within a one-hour time span. A computer program renders the digital display in real time, without any prerecorded animation or a loop.
Ever Blossoming Life Rock. Image credit: teamLab
TeamLab notes that these visuals can never be replicated, indicative of nature’s ever-changing life cycle.
“Universe of Water Particles on a Sacred Rock” is another installation at the park in which a simulated waterfall drapes over the sacred rock. The project was first created in a virtual three-dimensional space and then projected onto the rock itself located in the Inari Daimyojin shrine.
Universe of Water Particles on a Sacred Rock. Image credit: teamLab
While Shiseido is sponsoring the exhibit in its entirety, it also partnered with teamLab to create one installation to represent the brand.
WASO Tea House – “Flowers Bloom in an Infinite Universe, inside a Teacup” is a teashop in which visitors can sip on tea created from only five natural ingredients. These same ingredients are used in the brand’s new skincare line WASO, showing off how natural Shiseido products are.
Shiseido initiatives
In another digital initiative, Shiseido recently took the artificial intelligence trend one step further by employing humanoid robots on its assembly lines.
In a cosmetics industry first, Shiseido is working toward establishing a new form of manufacturing through a collaboration between humans and robots. While commonplace on mass automotive assembly lines, the high-end and luxury space has yet to trust humanoid robots to undertake the tasks typically taken on by its skilled workforce (see more).
Shiseido also recently took a big technological stance within its marketing practices. The brand determined the importance of unified customer data after it was able to unearth the potential of data from its digital marketing platform.
The beauty manufacturer had inadvertently created a series of silos within its customer data that led to a disjointed view of the audience and left sales that could be obtained through personalized marketing on the table. Shiseido partnered with data platform Treasure Data to come up with a solution that built an ID for each individual customer and gained insights based on four criteria (see more).