An all-round entertainer
The giant Exosphere in Las Vegas uses millions of LEDs to display images such as an Emoji, commissioned works, and others that tie in with sporting events and holidays
It is the world’s largest LED screen, offering nearly 53,900 sq m of artistic freedom. Each of Las Vegas entertainment venue Sphere’s diodes can display 256 million colours, and there are 48 of those diodes in each of the around 1.2 million LED pucks that blanket its exterior.
Yet for all of its bells and whistles, the most popular piece of content to have graced Sphere’s Exosphere resembles something that could have been texted on a smartphone.
He/she/it/they or however the smiling, yellow Emoji identifies – Sphere executives are not saying – has become the giant public face of the US$2.3 billion venue.
When Sphere was named by The New York Times among its 71 Most Stylish “People” of 2023 – between Utah ski crash trial defendant Gwyneth Paltrow and
The Traitors host Alan Cumming – it was Emoji in the photo.
Guy Barnett, who oversaw Sphere’s brand strategy and creative development before recently transitioning into a consulting role, declares it one of the venue’s “smash-hit successes”. And he knows a thing or two about pop-culture icons.
During his previous career in advertising, Barnett was the driving force behind a new spokesman who helped American broadcasting company NBC promote its acquisition of English Premier League football. The character’s name? Ted Lasso.
Last Fourth of July, when the Exosphere was illuminated for the first time and the world gazed upon it in wonderment, Barnett noticed something was missing.
“I think what we found, once we were in that landscape and we turned it on, is that there can be a lot more playfulness, a lot more connectivity with an audience that’s on the ground,” Barnett says. “A lot more fun can be had.”
One of Sphere’s early breakout hits was the realistic eyeball that kept watch over Las Vegas.
“There was a moment,” Barnett says, “where we thought, ‘This is going to freak people out.’” (Side note: It did.) “But then you also see it as a Salvador Dali homage once it’s in the cityscape. You see these artistic things that you can start to play around with. You can start to imagine different things.”
From those two realisations came Emoji.
In the beginning, Emoji mostly looked around, assessing its surroundings with a childlike curiosity while seemingly interacting with people on the ground, in hotel rooms and in planes.
Sometimes it slept, with cartoonish “Z”s floating about. Every so often, through a process Barnett refers to as “planned serendipity”, Emoji would look directly at the monorail travelling beneath it.
Everything changed, though, on October 9, when Canadian golf content creator Joseph Demare, who goes by the nickname Joey Cold Cuts, posted a video from his round at Wynn Golf Club, located at the Wynn Las Vegas.
Lined up in front of Sphere, Demare’s tee shot was perfectly timed so that it appeared Emoji watched it take flight before looking down in disgust.
“You know you suck,” Demare wrote in the caption, “when even the @spherevegas is trolling you after your tee shot.” It was not long before the video was everywhere, appearing on social media feeds and local newscasts.
“We started to think, ‘We now have a character that brings emotion and brings playfulness to the Sphere,’” Barnett says, “which we just started to enjoy more.”
The videos that play on the Exosphere are referred to internally as “clips”, Barnett says. “But I think that is underserving them. I think we need a better name for them than that.”
These days, almost all of the clips are made in-house by the 40- to 50-member team – including animators, camera operators, graphic designers and the big brains who figure out how to put the various pixels in the right places – at Sphere Studios in Burbank, California.
It is a collaborative process that starts with workshopping initial ideas to make them better.
For the festive period, for example, someone thought of putting an ugly jumper on the Sphere. Someone else built on that and suggested putting Emoji in an ugly jumper.
The final result had Emoji struggling to get that jumper over its big head, then delighting in catching snowflakes on its tongue.
A clip like that, which already has the base Emoji as a starting point, will involve a team of 15 to 20 people, Barnett says, and “we can be up and running within one to two weeks on stuff like that”.
Clips that must be built from the ground up can take the samesized team between four and six weeks, regardless of their ambition. Ones that may look simple, like the baseball that celebrated baseball team Oakland Athletics’ (potential) move to Las Vegas or the NBA Summer Leagueaffiliated basketball, are deceptively hard.
“Those things are actually more complicated in a way, because they’re more static,” Barnett says. “You have nowhere to hide [a mistake] when you’re looking at a basketball, so everything has to be spot on.”
With the sheer volume of clips, you could be forgiven for missing or even not giving the proper amount of attention to some of the truly special ones, such as those commissioned as part of Sphere’s XO/Art programme.
“This is the world’s biggest canvas, and so not to hand it over to some of the great visual artists of our time, I think, would be remiss of us,” Barnett says. “We make sure that we’re embracing as wide a community as possible with that programme.”
Refik Anadol, whose sitespecific works use machine learning, kicked off the programme on September 1 with Machine Hallucination: The Sphere.
The Turkish-born artist and his team created what he calls “AI data sculptures” using millions of raw images of space that were captured by the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope, and more than 300 million publicly available photos of nature.
It even incorporated real-time wind and gust speed data.
Sphere rang in 2024 with Andy Gilmore’s kaleidoscopic Dawn, Noon, Night. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, London-based artist David Oku debuted Vivid Dreams: A Colourful Celebration of MLK’s
Legacy. Shanghai native Shan Jiang contributed An Inked Flight, with flying dragons and paper lanterns, for Lunar New Year.
Super Bowl week saw a trio of new commissioned works. Los Angeles-based artist Mister Cartoon’s For the Love of Money resembled some of the black-and-grey fine-line tattoos he has inked on Eminem and Travis Barker.
Eric Haze, the former street artist who designed the logos for Public Enemy and Beastie Boys, tagged Sphere at the end of his piece Atmosphere.
And Robert Provenzano, professionally known as CES, brought New York’s “wild style” graffiti to the exosphere with his Gameplan.
Since then, Sphere has debuted Mirror of the Mind, a meditative, crystal-based installation by Krista Kim, who has been called one of the most influential people in the metaverse, as well as Now Forever, which resembles a Crayola-infused brain scan, from Italian multidisciplinary artist Michela Picchi.
The Exosphere’s art is a passion project for James Dolan, the New York billionaire who controls the New York Knicks basketball team, New York Rangers ice hockey team, New York venues Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, among other holdings, and oversees Sphere Entertainment as its executive chairman and CEO.
“He has a vision where we are giving back to the community, that we are sharing,” Barnett says. “We’re not just bombarding you with advertisements. We are creating spectacle and wonder and allowing people to enjoy it as opposed to being consistently sold to.”
That vision plays into what Barnett says is Sphere’s overall programming philosophy. “We want to entertain you. We want to make sure that you’re intrigued to keep following, to keep playing along with us.”
So far, those followers amount to 1.7 million fans on Instagram alone.
Moving forward, look for Sphere to continue to show off during big moments.
Is well as the commissioned pieces, Super Bowl week saw all 57 Super Bowl rings get their moment on the Exosphere.
And, in a break from the way it is normally programmed in advance, much like a television network complete with advertising breaks, the Exosphere was updated live during the game with score changes.
The future also will see more of Emoji, just not as often as you might expect.
“We’re being a little more judicious now about how we use our Emoji friend, so that we can really make those moments very special,” Barnett says.
We believe Hong Kong’s art market is big enough to sustain another fair, particularly in the second half of the year, similar to the auction model with spring and fall seasons
DAVID CHAU, CO-FOUNDER OF ART021 IN SHANGHAI WHO IS LAUNCHING A HONG KONG VERSION OF THE ANNUAL ART FAIR IN JULY > ARTS B13
There was a moment where we thought, ‘This is going to freak people out’ GUY BARNETT, CREATIVE DEVELOPER, ON THE EYEBALL IMAGE
We want to entertain you. We want to make sure that you’re intrigued to keep following GUY BARNETT