IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
Virtual concerts have been taking place in various games and platforms, such as Second Life and Minecraft, at least since 2008, as was the case with Coalchella and Firefest. However, this past Saturday, a new virtual concert held in the game Fortnite made history by bringing together 10 million viewers to watch a performance by EDM artist Marshmello. These numbers, as indicated by the website Futurism, are 25 times higher than the number of people who attended Woodstock in 1969.
One of the first performances, however, was held by the London-based band Redzone in the game Second Life in 2008. The idea at the time was to broadcast the virtual concert with new animations that included instruments like the theremin and electric violin, while the band would simultaneously perform a live show in the English capital. The event was confirmed at Thevenues, a venue not typically used for band performances, but it was the perfect choice to create the atmosphere for this experience, which would culminate in a final act at the Black Sun house, created specifically as an inspiration from the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which also features a description of a virtual concert performed by the fictional artist Vitaly Chernobyl.
It was the following year that musician Taylor Shechet discovered virtual concerts through news reported by Wired and also through contact with one of the collaborators on his project at the time, NVR-NDR. Bjorn Littlefield Palmer (AKA Kawaiietly Please / Ono-Sendai) was working as an administrator of a virtual island within the game Second Life, and because of this, he decided to show Shechet some of the DJ sets being broadcast in the game. It was then, starting from the Redzone tour and these experiments, that artists began to plan new projects focused specifically on the digital and virtual scene, such as when, in 2012, Shechet reached out to artists of purely digital genres like witch house and seapunk.
For Shechet, virtual concerts are an excellent format for artists because the costs of organizing such an event are lower and the potential to reach more people is greater. “It’s also possible to do things that can’t be done in real life, like flying or swimming in pools of iridescent, music-responsive slime,” he comments. And with the success of the virtual concert held by Marshmello, Shechet can also see a new era for musicians. “The success of the virtual concert in Fortnite is a huge moment for virtual concerts. More than 10 million participants is certainly a compelling number for investors,” he notes.
From a technical standpoint, Shechet also says that the events held in Fortnite are impressive; however, there are still some technical issues that prevent virtual concerts from becoming more widespread. That is, the problem is not the artists' willingness to test this new format, but rather the technical issues and the cultural challenges involved in adopting this format over the experience of a live show.
In any case, what we are seeing is that while virtual concerts are beginning to gain prominence, virtual artists, such as the character Hatsune Miku, have also been traveling the world to perform holographic concerts, thus reversing the logic of the virtual participating in the “real.” In the case of virtual concerts, the idea is to bring the “real” into the virtual and explore the unique features of this platform, as Shechet comments: “Many artists have an incredible imagination, and the virtual world gives them the possibility to realize their ideas that were previously not viable from a physical standpoint.”
Another point is that, as seen in initiatives such as the Boiler Room or even the Brazilian project Through, committing to digital and virtual formats is a consequence of the decentralization of pop culture since the introduction and popularization of the internet. As Shechet explains, many artists (especially independent ones) end up gathering considerable fan bases that are not concentrated in any single physical space, such as a city or a country. However, technical issues and people's hesitation to try new platforms and formats can still be a hurdle to the popularization of virtual concerts. "Chatting in a chat room is not the same as seeing your friends at a concert. This problem is partially solved on virtual reality concert platforms like Wave VR, which improves the sense of presence in a space with other people," the artist explains.
And it is because of these exchanges between the virtual and the real (or physical) that Taylor Shechet, who has even worked with the Hatsune Miku team during a tour in the United States, prefers to use the term XR, generally used for mixed reality. Originally, the artist understood the X as something unknown, like the variable x used in mathematics; however, the letter later took on another meaning for him. "I realized that the X can also mean a cross, which makes it a very inclusive term for all configurations across realities."
In other words, what this transition between virtual and real (or physical) formats points to is precisely this inclusion and dissolution between the real and the virtual: at the same time that millions go to a concert hall to watch a hologram that travels the world, millions also watched DJ Marshmello's virtual performance this past Saturday. By combining the relevance and reach of video game streamers with artists willing to perform in immersive environments, it is possible to envision a new moment not only for the entertainment industry but also for artistic creation in music and the visual arts.
