Noooo thanks. So much of a live show is physical for me, in many different ways. Watching what essentially amounts to a livestream feels totally joyless as a ‘concert experience’.
I’ve tried a few prerecorded live shows in Facebook’s VR Venues app. You basically stand on a digital balcony and watch a poorly recorded video that fills your entire view from the balcony. The thing is the gig hasn’t been recorded to look like the viewpoint is the same as yours, so you see lots of intercutting angles and closeups, so nothing feels like it’s ‘real’, it’s just a bit disorientating and annoying. If they filmed so it felt like it was recorded at the same viewpoint as your avatar then it would feel more immersive.
Plus other people wanting to virtually talk to you during the gig is just as fucking annoying as it is in real life.
Is this like that strange Everything Everything virtual show from a year or two back, where people were simulated as avatars in the crowd in a venue watching the band?
I mean, I’m into the idea of online “art happenings” in theory but find the idea of a concert online extremely naff. Feels like a corporate cash in on the tech rather than a creative thing done by creative people. Concerts and gigs are an inherently live experience and I would be much more up for a ticketed online experience that was inherently online, if that makes sense. Something that couldn’t feasibly be done any other way.
I guess the analogy would be that computer games tell very different stories to books, which tell very different stories to films… or at least tell stories very differently, which is why successful crossovers between mediums are so tough. For example playing as Master Chief is an empowering experience, whereas watching a guy being hard in a green suit for an hour is kind of just a bit humiliating.
Now what this new form of inherently online expression should look like I don’t know, but it can’t just be paying to watch a video link to something that would be infinitely mores special in meatspace.
Whilst I don’t disagree with this, the tour circuit has really contracted over the last 20 years, and a lot of people simply don’t live near where bands play anymore. Stuff like this has real potential to make live music more accessible.
I understand that argument, but still feel like it will never be a live experience. Just like internet pornography doesn’t make sexual intercourse more accessible, although it does allow people to witness sexual acts that they might never perform themselves. It doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t necessarily be an entertaining way to experience music, but it isn’t the same thing.
Maybe one day it will be - maybe I’m reaching that age where cynicism bites in and I can’t possibly envisage how good tech will be in the future. Maybe the VR experience will be a genuine simulacrum of reality, but for now it doesn’t feel much more than an Youtube video with 3D glasses.
