Saturday Essay When Abba returns to the stage next year as avatars, it’s an unprecedented project: This is how the long-kept secret performance of up to a thousand people was created

“Give let him rest in peace! ”

Not all fans consider a good idea to have a singer brought to the stage as a hologram Whitney from Houston, quickly finds out from the comment line below the Youtube videos of the Houston Hologram Tour.

Known as an excellent singer, Houston died in 2012, at just 48 years old. Eight years later in 2020, he rose to the stage for the first time as a hologram, a “living” reflection. The tour was supposed to come to Europe as well, but the coronavirus pandemic stalled. In July of this year, Ghost Houston returned to the limelight in Las Vegas, USA. The show continues.

American inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) uttered to a steel cylinder coated with tin paper in 1877, through a funnel, a piece of the baby lamb from Mari’s lamb: Mary had a little lamb…

The magical history of sound recording had begun. Edison had predecessors, but he avoided patenting his invention right away. Information about it also spread to the distant Grand Duchy of Finland. In return for Mark’s entrance fee, the phonography could be marveled at at the recently completed Helsinki Student House as early as 1879. Among other things, the poet was watching the sound. Zachris Topeliuswho became enthusiastic about rhyming the situation with a poem The phonograph is complete.

Edison was a seer: he thought his invention was suitable for many purposes: as a music box, as a toy, for teaching, for recording novels in a read-aloud form (!) – and for recording the last words of mortals.

Edison himself continues to rattle about the lamb on the internet, with a later recording. He also designed a spirit phone that could be used to contact the afterlife, but not go there now.

A man of the Spotify era take the recorded treasures for granted. Behind the touch is a huge amount of music: light, heavy and serious, close and far from the world, almost anything you could hope for, even for free. There, somewhere in the ether, the living and the dead sing and overlap. And now humanity has progressed to the point where those who have already left will return to the stage to perform.

And that’s not all. Some living superstars have decided to rewind time and return to the stage in their most flowery splendor, at the peak of their popularity. After a break of forty years.

When Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus began to seriously consider the possibility of the Abba band’s return concert with modern technology, they quickly abandoned the Idols Simon Fullerin the idea presented to them about the appearance of holograms. It was reported in 2018.

Holograms have their limitations, for example, they cannot be properly illuminated, acting as another producer in the project Ludvig Andersson told Abba in a special issue recently published in Sweden. Besides, Abbas are already experiencing a hologram style on the stage of Stockholm’s Abba Museum, where any amateur can whine alongside them. Voulez-vous!

To be precise, a large portion of hologram tours are not even based on hologram technology, but on the Pepper Ghost phenomenon. The actual hologram utilizing laser beams was invented by a Hungarian Henry Gabor in 1947. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention. The ghost of Pepper (Pepper’s Ghost) technology became known as early as the 1860s by an English scientist John Henry Pepperin thanks to.

For example, the technology widely used in theaters is based on reflections. Videos explaining the technology are easy to find on Youtube, as are tricks on how to get even your own smartphone to produce Pepper’s ghosts.

Before Houston, the star of Rap, among others, has been seen as a hologram Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) and King of Pop Michael Jackson (1958–2009). In Finland Mikael Gabriel The reflection danced five years ago in a telecom operator’s shop along Aleksanterinkatu, a stone’s throw from a place where Edison’s phonography had been marveled at 130 years earlier. The show of the Gorillaz band, which will arrive in Helsinki next August for the Flow festival, is also based on advanced technology. A few years ago the beakman of the band Damon Albarn told Wired frustrated by the slow development of hologram technology.

We live wonderfully times of augmented and augmented reality. In 2018, for example, there was news of a device that could move a three-dimensional figure thousands of miles away.

Read more: The device, developed by scientists, moves a three-dimensional figure even thousands of miles away and can revolutionize video conferencing

Abbak wanted a fresher technology than the ghosts of Pepper for his return concert. An unprecedented and long-kept recording production began three years ago when the thong was stepped on. George Lucasin Star Wars Industrial Light & Magic, originally founded by the company for the special effects of the film.

The project, which premiered in May 2022, began to grow. It became so demanding that it is not for that built their own arena, which can accommodate 3,000 listeners. The lease term of the arena is five years. It can then be dismantled and erected elsewhere.

Abba members closed at the Stockholm Filmhuset for five weeks to sing their new and old songs in their special motion capture or performance capture. Motion Capture is a technique for “capturing” the movements of a moving object into digital form. Hijackers were surrounded by 150 technicians and hundreds of Industrial Light & Magic technicians and hundreds of other workers, a maximum of nearly a thousand.

Compared to Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, the Abba Quartet has a significant advantage in carrying out their production: they are alive. They can decide for themselves how they perform. The work is done by a group of the world’s best virtual reality builders.

AND because the (entertainment) world loves youth, the goal is not to capture in an avatar format the musicians of the seventies with their wrinkles and gray hair. A number of actors in their thirties also danced in the studio. In this way, young and supple energy was preserved in digital muvets.

Abban VoyageThe 1979 habitus is intended. One of the reasons for choosing that particular year is that abbo’s Hairstyle was the best at the time. The digital recording of emotions and expressions required Benny and Björn to shave their beards, which must have been painful, especially for Björn.

The videos from the recording phase tell their own language about the dimensions and technology of the giant project.

Abba paused in 1982. When they return to the stage as digital abbatar avatars in London next spring, a new chapter will be written into the history of popular music. Another producer of the project Svana Gisla says the goal is to unite the digital and physical worlds, to break the code between them. The key word is light. Director Bailey Walsh did it with light, Gisla says in one of the promotional videos:

Never before has a show been seen where digitally created characters perform rejuvenated with a live band – and the characters ’models, the real musicians of blood and flesh, still sit in the auditorium.

There are existential levels in all of this that I have not yet had time to internalize properly, Abba’s lyricist Gjjörn Ulvaeus reflected in the Abba special issue mentioned earlier. He believes the performance “will mean something we had no idea”:

“Avatars have got our movement and our faces. We have also given them a soul in a way. Indeed, really. ”

Voyagewith the album Björn Ulvaeus sums up the essentials in a few rhymes. Like:

And now you see another me, I’ve been reloaded…

I’m like a dream in a dream that has been Decoded…

I’m not the same you knew – – I’m now and then combined.

Benny and Ludvig Andersson, father and son, assure in the promo video that they are there on stage, all by themselves.

Holograms or Pepper’s ghosts on stage after his death, no one could ask again if they wanted to perform.

Abba, for her part, uses some of her billion-dollar assets to relive her youth, in digital form, the way she chooses. Maybe even after his death.

Correction 20.11 at 13.52 The story previously read that Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur had been on a hologram tour, but it was about individual appearances. Also corrected Svana Gisla’s name to the correct format.