Talking point: holograms on stage!
With news Abba will be touring in hologram form we look at the issues involved in using digital stars and the surprising 19th Century roots of the technology!
It was a Waterloo moment when we learned earlier this year that Abba were getting back together. But, sadly, the jubilation didn’t last when we discovered that while we’d be able to see Benny, Björn, Agnetha and Anni-Frid singing for the first time in years, they would be digital versions
– or ‘Abbatars’ as they’re being called – performing on stage.
Abba are the latest in a long line of famous faces to appear in hologram form, although it’s mainly been used for artists such as Michael Jackson and Elvis, who have the excuse of being dead for not doing their own concerts. While of course thousands of Abba fans will revel in the chance to be dancing queens with the band as the next best thing to a real reunion, is it really worth a hefty ticket price to watch four digitally screened projections – with vocals stripped from their 1977 Australian tour – unable to interact, influence the crowd or do anything particularly human?
Having seen one of these hologram performances myself for the Roy Orbison tour, I can report that it can get just a bit, well... creepy. There’s no doubt this technology does a smashing job of making the hologram totally lifelike – there’s no ghost-like aura or dodgy special effects as I’d expected – but still the fact the artist can’t react to anything meant the performance lacked any of the magic of live music. There’s none of those bum notes, cleared throats or interludes of chat that make live performance so exciting. In fact, it all begged the question why we simply hadn’t just stayed at home and watched a DVD of one of Roy’s old concerts, or even a tribute act as some audience members I overheard that night believed Roy’s hologram to be. Given Abba are among the first living artists to transform into hologram form, you do wonder what the future holds for such technology. Will charttopping artists simply abandon live tours altogether when they realise they can still earn a packet by sending their hologram self instead? As for the artists being brought back from the dead to perform in hologram, while their family and estate must approve such moves, you have to question if the likes of Maria Callas or Billie Holliday – who’ve recently been morphed into hologram form – would have preferred to have been left to rest in peace rather than paraded on stage years after their passing. With hologram technology still costing stratospheric sums and involving headache-inducing logistics, it’s unlikely to become the norm right now. But with such big acts as Abba experimenting with it, who knows if our future may look more and more holographic?
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