philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

One of the biggest venues in the world for video art—Las Vegas’s Sphere delivers virtual reality (without the headset)

... It was a powerful experience—somewhere between the old-school pleasures of a planetarium and the immediacy of virtual reality (more thrilling without the headset!)—and nonetheless disorienting. ...

... it overnight became one of the biggest venues in the world for video art. (Exosphere, the name for Sphere’s exterior screen, is the perfect canvas for images of eyeballs or globes, but otherwise not as powerful.) ...

... only Brambilla and Devlin’s work were stylistically distinct enough to read as artworks. Brambilla stitched together over a thousand movie clips referencing Elvis and Vegas to create one of his characteristic scrolling video tapestries, the Bosch-like delirium of imagery being his recognisable signature at this point. And Devlin created an awe-inspiring digital tapestry featuring 26 hand-drawn examples of fantastic-looking but real species in Nevada on the verge of extinction, which grew from her Come Home Againinstallation in the gardens of the Tate Modern.
The other artworks were largely subsumed by the concert theatrics, Sphere being a great leveller of video art in much the way the internet is with photography. Who cares about authorship when a flood of stunning images is washing over you?...

The unexpected appearance of this night-time Vegas scene was probably the most powerful example of Sphere technology in action. Suddenly the band seemed to be playing in front of the real, blinking city skyline complete with its colour-shifting Ferris Wheel instead of in front a screen picturing such things. Out of some stubborn journalistic habit I asked who created that piece, and it turned out to be a team at George Lucas’s visual effects company Industrial Light and Magic. And there it was, the category that best describes Sphere’s leading video art and special effects alike, the condition that so much digital imagery today aspires to: magic.

See the full article here: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/12/26/one-of-the-biggest-venues-in-the-world-for-video-artlas-vegass-sphere-delivers-virtual-reality-without-the-headset