Will Sphere Las Vegas trigger an art revolution? Its first show stirs the imagination

“People were gasping in awe,” wrote Nina DiGregorio, founder of the group Femmes of Rock and the pioneer of electric rock violin.

She was there Friday when the Irish rock band U2 opened Sphere in Las Vegas, the round concert hall whose architecture is embedded with 260 million video pixels, making it the largest LED screen or largest movie screen in the world.

Sphere’s exterior and interior walls are actually canvasses that can do anything you ask a computer to do and more, which opens up a world of possibilities that have just begun to be contemplated.

The opening night audience of 17,600 people was dazzled when the entire interior circumference became a desert landscape, giving everyone the communal experience of sharing an outdoor amphitheater beneath a sprawling Western sky.

“Forget everything you’ve ever known,” wrote DiGregorio. “This is unlike anything I’ve seen, and I’ve been on a lot of stages with a lot of different artists.”

“Every other stage, every other concert venue, every other lighting rig is now dwarfed in comparison.” 

A building that wants to make itself disappear

U2’s Bono shared her enthusiasm. “This is really mind-bending,” he told the CBS Evening News.

At one point in the U2 show, the screen filled with images of birds that looked like intricate wood cuts that eventually consumed the venue.

On this night, the $2.3 billion sphere was a marriage of serious art and computers and classic rock.

CBS Evening News asked one of the show designers, Ann Devlin, “What were the marching orders you were given for this?”

“To create a cathedral,” she said.

“The building has at its core paradox that it has been massively invested in to put it here and wants to imagine itself gone.”

So it disappeared when the NBA opened its Summer League in Las Vegas and projected itself as a giant basketball, with each dimple visible in high definition.

So dazzling are the outdoor graphics that Las Vegas drivers are slowing down or stopping to take pictures, creating traffic congestion, reported by 8NewsNow reporter Sasha Loftis. “The only way to describe is breathtaking.”

Imagine the possibilities for such a venue

What could a Broadway producer do with Sphere?  It boggles the mind. She might envelop her audience with the stage – putting them at any place on the map and any place in history.

Imagine a motion picture that makes you forget you’re in a theater – in which not just the mind’s eye but the naked eye draws you into the story.

Today Sphere is thought of as a concert hall, but imagine an NFL Draft that opens with its audience experiencing the sensation of sitting on the field at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, looking out in all directions at 80,000 screaming NFL fans projected on the walls.

Imagine 17,500 gamers walking into a venue and playing a single game on the same massive video screen. Perhaps they are divided into two armies with two hours to conquer the world.

Get ready to feel the world in a different way

Imagine a symphony orchestra performing Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite as the audience banks across the canyon walls or dives low for the Colorado River.

Imagine riding a man-of-war on the rolling waves of the North Sea as an orchestra plays Ravel’s Une barque sur l'océan. 

Yes, symphonies have already married screens with music, but Sphere will put the audience on the quarterdeck of a wooden ship as it moves with the sea swells.

Multimedia is taking off in ingenious ways, opening new doors for artists. We are about to see and feel our world in ways we never have before.

Sphere is a feast for the imagination and an invitation to artists to start testing and exploding its boundaries.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Sphere marries art and science to immerse and bedazzle large audiences