Digital Technology, Multisensory Extension, and the Scalability of Media Art

A Case Study of TeamLab Borderless Shanghai

Abstract

The rapid advancement of digital technology has catalyzed a profound transformation in media art, enabling its expansion across sensory, spatial, interactive, economic, and social dimensions in ways that challenge longstanding assumptions about artistic form, audience engagement, and cultural value. This article employs Marshall McLuhan's media theory — particularly the propositions that 'the medium is the message' and that media constitute extensions of the human sensorium — as an analytical framework to examine the multidimensional scalability of contemporary media art. Drawing on TeamLab Borderless Shanghai as a primary case study, the analysis proceeds through four interrelated dimensions: technology integration and sensory extension; interactivity and the reconfiguration of creative agency; spatio-temporal reconstruction; and economic and social transformation. The article argues that media art, understood through a McLuhanesque lens, does not merely deploy digital technology as a neutral vehicle for aesthetic content; rather, the technological medium itself is the constitutive message, actively reshaping perceptual ratios, reconfiguring the ontological boundary between artwork and audience, and generating systemic socio-economic effects. As generative artificial intelligence and extended reality technologies deepen their integration with artistic practice, the scalable boundaries of media art will continue to expand, warranting sustained theoretical and empirical attention from scholars of media, culture, and the arts.