I would love to um show you something brand new that just happened in Las [Music] Vegas even better than the real thing even better than the real [Music] [Music] [Applause] even thank you uh the Irish rock band You2 of course inaugurating the sphere in Las Vegas a brand new facility which is somewhere between an IMAX theater and a planetarium large enough to contain the Statue of Liberty after Decades of Big Rock shows being staged mostly in sport facilities for 40 shows 18,000 people a night were immersed in sound and vision in a whole new way and um did anybody go by the way I know some people go oh yeah okay did anybody not go okay great well then you'll know what I'm talking about so I design and direct live shows and um the um foundations of my work were in concert touring and I got to work with some really cool people including George Michael R David Bowie and many more and for 40 years I've been creative director for you's live performances going from small clubs to football stadiums and um having done well over a thousand shows with them in 250 cities in 40 countries I uh yeah it's been a journey um I head up you's long-standing creative team and every time we go to make a new show we're trying to reinvent the form in some way starting with a blank slate and checking out everything that's gone before except for one thing which is always the goal of creating emotional connection between the audience and the performers so in the very early 80s uh you was building on the roots of punk which came from this very pure and minimal place where making any effort at all with your stage visuals was considered extremely go and very uncool but as the scale of you two shows increased we coined the phrase maximum minimalism and that got us into a place where we could kind of hang on to some of this imagined authenticity whilst catering to the needs of playing Arenas and football stadiums and it really worked I mean the the raw energy of those shows was incredible but from a design point of view there's really any so far you can take that idea before you hit a world so uh we were looking for new possibilities in visual storytelling and through the '90s completely fell in love with all the new emerging visual Technologies and so embraced those threw away the handbook and decided to see what we could do with them and on a pair of you tours Zoot TV and popmart uh we pretty much introduced the style of multiscreen big video presentation that's still around today in uh in concert touring and that included for popmart the building of the world's very first Stadium scale LED video screen which was handbuilt from components for the tour they're not unambitious these people since then we've made shows large and small some leading into audio visual ideas others taking a more architectural stance and along the way collaborating with a veritable who's who of the Contemporary artart world but always with the goal of trying to challenge and reinvent the notion of what a rock concert can be after 40 Years of reinvention I suppose maybe there was another wall lubing um so when we heard about this new building that was going up in Las Vegas we went to check it out and the sphere is designed essentially for showing movies at humongous scale at extremely high resolution but I found myself looking at the space and wondering if there was some other way that we might be able to inhabit this wraparound immersive space and the thing that occurred to me the thing that really struck me was the absence of Corners we navigate space via corners and you know how big the room is that you're in because you can see the corners and that helps you feel grounded whereas at the Sphere not only are there no corners but I wondered if we were to introduce virtual corners of our own would we be able to manipulate the audience's sense of perspective and apparently alter the space radically so I made a whole load of test material and was absolutely Overjoyed at how well it worked the degree to which your brain wants to bind to the illusion is extraordinary and I found that I could take this sphere and turn it into an infinitely tall cylinder and then maybe into a cube and then bring the roof down on top of everybody and everything you're seeing all of this is just video on a curved surface but um it what it informed me was that I need to stop thinking about this as being a screen and start thinking of it as being a place a three-dimensional audiovisual space and that the kind of environments that would work here might be the kind of thing You' make for VR rather than for Cinema now to make the illusion work uh it's vital never to break the spell so this sense of place has to be established before the viewer even gets there and when the U audience arrived at the sphere they walked into this gigantic optical illusion the scale of it really was shocking and they walked into this thing which looked like an oversized version of the pantheon in Rome uh but made out of giant concrete slabs and out to the night sky and I used to love EAS dropping on audience conversations of people just trying to figure out what they were looking at you know what was real and what wasn't and but it had a genuine materiality that was that was really hard to resist so over time I added some features to make it even harder to resist my favorite being this pigeon which used to live up in the roof space and periodically fly around before eventually escaping through the Oculus and I put in a a helium balloon like a kid's helium balloon that got stuck in the roof like happens at shopping mall and there was a work light that would come on and Flicker and then right at Showtime we'd fly the band's helicopter over the roof with a suitable soundtrack um now you know reality check that band doesn't actually travel by helicopter and none of this is real anyway but the point is you are in this environment for over an hour and you never stop believing in it and that's before the show even started so so during the show we immerse the audience in new worlds overwhelm their senses push the Horizon back to Infinity shape shift the room and then eventually make the building disappear alt together and reveal Las Vegas outside so this is the moment that we find ourselves in an entire audience's sensory perception being choreographed by the artist on a scale that overwhelms the physical being and you's music the the emotive power of that Music performed in this environment that was what was so new that produced something really unprecedented well to say it was well received would be something of an understatement um the the critics raved the internet broke a whole new era of live entertainment was declared to the point where the reviews themselves were being reviewed some irony I think but um I'll take it I mean GE you don't get that very often so but what was more remarkable was that it was just a couple of years after um you know we all wondered if we'd ever be able to gather thousands of people together ever again and the pandemic was it was a really Bleak time for everybody involved in live entertainment and I know you guys at Ted had a tough time with it too but the brightest minds of the industry by way of compensation started to come up with Alternatives and we saw some really interesting ideas we saw the construction of XR Studios for live broadcast and concerts for VR headsets and virtual audiences like this participating in real time online and really interesting ideas they got a ton of attention load and loads of investment until lockdown ended at which point nobody ever mentioned them again so I got to tell you for those of us that do this for a living it was profoundly humbling to realize that we can reproduce every part of the live experience apart from the bit the audience actually wants the most like it turns out humans are drawn to proximity we want to come together in a specific place in real time to share an experience kind of like we're doing this week you know and it's been my U task to understand how audiences work and there's certainly something to learn from our response as we look out at the ocean or up at the night sky where our minds are using a combination of vision and Imagination to create an emotional response that can Inspire us or sometimes completely overwhelm us but the interesting thing is we so need this response that it still works even if our rational Minds know that what we're looking at isn't real hence the power of great works of art now the Renaissance painters hit upon the use of perspective to create apparently three-dimensional worlds on what the viewer knew had to be a flat plane and our brain insists it's real even though we know it's just marks on canvas but better yet the use of perspective allows the viewer to forget the technique completely and surrender to the content of the image in a more profound and emotional way but we're still separated from the image here we're still Outsiders looking in whereas at the sphere we all together performers and audience traveled through the picture frame through the prenium and ended up as part of the environment and it really was quite something it was like VR without a headset although with a couple of important differences in his novel rainbows end the writer Verna vinger inv visited a world that doesn't seem too far away now where everybody through the use of wearable AR technology could create their own bespoke artificial environments now at this U show the environments were artificial but they were also shared all of us experiencing it together in real life and much as I do believe that gaming and certain other online activities can produce a real sense of connection it was the physical proximity here that produced something so profound and so affecting and you's music just the m i me music the the original imers experience performed in this environment music can bring us together and it allows us to forget oursel as we become part of something larger looking up at something So Glorious and so magnificent but we've seen this before right we recognize this from somewhere the cathedral Builders they knew a thing or two about Show Business uh they were very good at it and they were not afraid of working at scale being the original practitioners of what we call in the business go big or go home and look the amount of time the amount of resources poured into the building of these places over centuries tells us that we've been feeling for this experience for as long as we've been human or and wonder placed under the control of the artist and today we have the most powerful tools we've ever had to do this so what's our motivation here you know what's our what's our goal in doing this well for me in my my work I only have one goal which is to bring people together to share some joy and to share some magic and to make genuine emotional connection between for the audience with the performers and with each other and with this music which means something unique and personal to everyone who attends and in that moment open up the possibility of creating empathy between strangers who might not agree on anything else it's a small thing but it's a start and that's what my particular brand of magic exists for well that I'm giving people a really really good [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] time y yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah thank you have a great week [Applause]