Music is only part of the audio-visual experience in U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere, the 25-date U2 residency that opened Sphere in Las Vegas on Sept. 29 and will run through December. For the show, creative directors Willie Williams and Es Devlin helped the band harness Sphere’s technological potential with immersive visuals, including pieces commissioned specifically for U2:UV and the innovative venue’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen.
Among the creatives to work with the band was visual artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla, whose eye-popping video collage “King Size” serves as the backdrop for “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Achtung Baby‘s second track. For three decades, Brambilla, who began his career as a director, including of the 1993 sci-fi film Demolition Man, has created visual art pieces that grapple with subjects including media oversaturation, technology’s effects, and the nature of pop culture. In 2008, Brambilla began harvesting short loops of source material – clips of characters, landscapes, and backgrounds that were each one second or less – to make high-concept video collages that tackle “epic human themes, but interpreted in a way that’s very much about sensory overload in today’s media landscape,” he explains. After seeing one of his recent collages, “Heaven’s Gate,” at London’s immersive space Outernet Arts in early 2023, Williams reached out to Brambilla about becoming involved in U2:UV.
Brambilla’s no stranger to large-scale art installations – for one, Outernet bills itself as having “the world’s largest wrap-around screens” – but even so, Sphere’s unprecedented canvas offered new challenges and rewards. For Brambilla, whose rare musical collaborations include two operas with Marina Abramović and Kanye West’s 2010 “Power” music video, it also presented the opportunity to work with one of rock’s most visually daring artists – and on his favorite song off his favorite U2 album, no less.
“It’s fantastic, because Sphere is giving performers an opportunity to go into a space and be able to have visuals that you could never tour, without this technology and without the permanent installation of the LED screens,” Brambilla tells Billboard hours before leaving Paris for Sphere’s opening. “There’s all sorts of possibilities – and I think they’ve only scratched the surface.”
How did you get connected with U2 and Sphere?
Willie went to see the [“Heaven’s Gate”] show and I got a call, and he asked if I would be interested in a commission for the residency that was coming up at Sphere. I had obviously heard about Sphere before and I became very interested very quickly, because the scale of the space and the technology was always really fascinating for me. From there, the only brief from them was really, “We want something really maximal, like, sensory overload.”
Then the concept of Elvis came up. The idea of the birth of Las Vegas and the death of Elvis became interconnected in my mind. I’d started watching a lot of Elvis films and doing a lot of research on his rise and fall. It seemed very prescient – it seemed like a really interesting commentary on what’s going on today. I put together the concept in a very short amount of time, it only took about a week. Then I started making the work.
Usually when I make a video collage I have scheduled anywhere between six months and a year. And in this case, I only had maybe three, three and a half months to make it. So it required a lot of new technology. I used a lot of AI to assist in making it and also to make versions of Elvis that would populate the canvas in AI.
How would you describe “King Size”?
It’s an upward scroll — the piece scrolls upwards from the desert. It starts in a very stylized, very theatrical version of the desert and Las Vegas, and then neon rises from the desert. Then, eventually, it becomes like a futuristic, hyper-version of Vegas, like a mega Vegas. At the same time, the characters are associated with every era of Las Vegas. So you have Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin in the kind of glamour years, and then it becomes more about performers and strippers and dance clubs as you go up.
And there’s also samples from many of Elvis’s characters he played in films, as well as samples from documentaries that we found that we were able to create gifs from. And so that became the population of it. But the architecture of it is really the birth of Las Vegas.
Did you come up with the concept with U2 and Willie?
It was actually in conjunction with Bono, because we were talking about how to express this idea of a myth – you know, like what happens to celebrities. Elvis was the first mega-celebrity, in a way. Bono said, “Oh, this could be about the death of Elvis, the death of Elvis is an interesting theme.” That was a departure point that became very clear, this idea of the parallel of excess and consumerism and the American dream and what’s happened to the American dream being personified by what happened to Elvis Presley. The lyrics in [“Even Better Than the Real Thing”] are exactly about that theme that I was exploring visually. It worked really well thematically, not just visually.
U2 has a rich history of creating forward-thinking, immersive concert experiences. What were they like as collaborative partners?
It was probably the best collaboration I’ve ever had. They really respect you as an artist. They commissioned John Gerrard, Es Devlin and Brian Eno to make pieces [for U2:UV], and these pieces are art pieces. They really wanted something that would stand alone as an art installation. The technical aspects of working with the scale of the screen at Sphere, that was incredibly complicated. The actual creative process, in terms of being able to make an artwork, that was incredibly easy and rewarding, because they were just fantastically supportive and really easy to work with.
How did realizing this piece on Sphere’s screen differ from other installations you’ve done?
I’d worked on large-scale, site-specific installations, as well as museum and gallery shows. But in this case, it was unprecedented. Both the scale and the resolution were so much more than anything I’d [previously worked on] – and I’d already worked on some fairly ambitious projects. This was, by a factor of four, more ambitious in terms of the technology involved.
What did that specifically involve for you?
The collage is a hybrid: It contains elements that are entirely generated by AI and elements that are computer-generated, but using AI pre-visualization. That helped tremendously in terms of the [expedited] schedule and being able to create something very dense and very rich. But [Sphere] also has very good tools to help you pre-visualize it. As you’re making the work, there’s a headset simulator that they have where you can pick any seat you want and you can choose to sit in the front row or halfway up or in the corner, and you can look at your work on the Sphere in this headset. I was able to do this remotely. I only saw it in Sphere about two and a half weeks ago.
What were the biggest challenges?
Just rendering files that are that size and to create the kind of sharpness and resolution necessary [for Sphere’s screen], it’s challenging. But it’s gonna get easier and easier. As the technology gets better and you have more computing power, you’ll be able to generate visuals at that resolution with in an easier way. So I think it’s kind of future-proof in terms of being able to create visuals; right now, it’s early days. We’re kind of inventing the technology as we go.
Tell me more about how you used AI to create “King Size.”
I was working on another project, for a show that’s coming up next year, using AI, and I was very happy to be familiar with it [when I started working on “King Size”]. I was able to speed up the process, because over the course of making so many of these [visual collages] over the years, I have a huge library of film clips. I was able to train an AI software called Stable Diffusion with all these clips. Basically, the library went into AI, and then I was able to call up images very quickly. It became a kind of a collaboration with me and the AI working to find images that would fit the storyline.
We started using a program called DALL-E in its beta phase and generated a lot of prototype visuals of Elvis and different versions of Elvis, these kind of fantastical exaggerations of Elvis using that program. The good thing about AI right now is I couldn’t have made this work without it in time I had – it would have been impossible to attempt to make something at this resolution and with this kind of detail.
How long might it have taken without AI assistance?
It would have taken at least a year. “Heaven’s Gate” took eight months, and the resolution was 8K; this one is 16K, and it has probably four times the number of samples as “Heaven’s Gate.” With every increase in resolution for what I’m doing […] you have to create a canvas that has much more information in it. The rendering at that resolution becomes very time consuming. I was working with a really great post-production company called The Mill in Paris and we were able to output the files fairly quickly.
How might artists utilize Sphere’s canvas going forward?
They have a sound system that can localize sound very precisely. The screens are so sharp that you’re not aware of pixels, you’re not aware of any kind of resolution, it just looks like a window into another world. It removes the concept of being somewhere. You’re transported somewhere else. There’s so many things you can do with it, because the technology that’s in that building, that’s permanent technology, allows you to experiment with all sorts of interaction between the performance and the screens themselves.
