my NEWS How Las Vegas’ Sphere brings art to the masses on ‘the world’s biggest canvas’, and creates fun with a giant emoji The giant Exosphere in Las Vegas uses millions of LEDs to display images such as a smiling emoji, and others that tie in with sports events and holidays Specially commissioned art is shown too as a way of ‘giving back’, says one of Sphere’s creative leads, who sheds light on what displays to expect in the future It is the world’s largest LED screen, offering nearly 580,000 square feet of artistic freedom. Each of Las Vegas entertainment venue Sphere’s diodes can display 256 million colours, and there are 48 of those diodes in each of the approximately 1.2 million LED pucks that blanket its exterior. Yet for all of its bells and whistles, every state-of-the-art this and never-been-done-before that, the most popular piece of content to have graced Sphere’s Exosphere resembles something that could have been texted on a smartphone. The Traitors host Alan Cumming – it was Emoji in the photo. Guy Barnett, who oversaw Sphere’s brand strategy and creative development before recently transitioning into a consulting role, declares it one of the venue’s “smash-hit successes”. And he knows a thing or two about pop-culture icons. During his previous career in advertising, Barnett was the driving force behind a new spokesman who helped American broadcasting company NBC promote its acquisition of English Premier League football. The story behind Hidden Space, industrial Hong Kong art space Last Fourth of July, when the Exosphere was illuminated for the first time and the world gazed upon it in slack-jawed wonderment, Barnett noticed something was missing. “I think what we found, once we were in that landscape and we turned it on, is that there can be a lot more playfulness, a lot more connectivity with an audience that’s on the ground,” Barnett says. “A lot more fun can be had.” One of Sphere’s early breakout hits was the realistic eyeball that kept watch over Las Vegas. From those two realisations came Emoji. In the beginning, Emoji mostly looked around, assessing its surroundings with a childlike curiosity while seemingly interacting with people on the ground, in hotel rooms and in aeroplanes. Sometimes it slept, with cartoonish “Z”s floating about. Every so often, through a process Barnett refers to as “planned serendipity”, Emoji would look directly at the monorail travelling beneath it. Everything changed, though, on October 9, when Canadian golf content creator Joseph Demare, who goes by the nickname Joey Cold Cuts, posted a video from his round at Wynn Golf Club, located at the Wynn Las Vegas. Lined up in front of Sphere, Demare’s tee shot was perfectly timed so that it appeared Emoji watched it take flight before looking down in disgust. “You know you suck,” Demare wrote in the caption, “when even the @spherevegas is trolling you after your tee shot.” It was not long before the video was everywhere, appearing on social media feeds and local newscasts. “We started to think, ‘We now have a character that brings emotion and brings playfulness to the Sphere,’” Barnett says, “which we just started to enjoy more and more.” The videos that play on the Exosphere are referred to internally as “clips”, Barnett says. “But I think that is underserving them. I think we need a better name for them than that.” ‘A new view of the city’: US artist’s film of Hong Kong, star of M+ facade These days, almost all of the clips are made in-house by the 40- to 50-member team – including animators, camera operators, graphic designers and the big brains who figure out how to put the various pixels in the right places – at Sphere Studios in Burbank, California. It is a collaborative process that starts with workshopping initial ideas to make them better. For the festive period, for example, someone thought of putting an ugly jumper on the Sphere. Someone else built on that and suggested putting Emoji in an ugly jumper. The final result had Emoji struggling to get that jumper over its big head, then delighting in catching snowflakes on its tongue. CGI pioneer, Avatar director James Cameron, says ‘pump the brakes’ on AI A clip like that, which already has the base Emoji as a starting point, will involve a team of 15 to 20 people, Barnett says, and “we can be up and running within one to two weeks on stuff like that”. Clips that must be built from the ground up can take the same-sized team between four and six weeks, regardless of their ambition. Ones that may look simple, like the baseball that celebrated baseball team Oakland Athletics’ (potential) move to Las Vegas or the NBA Summer League-affiliated basketball, are deceptively hard. “Those things are actually more complicated in a way, because they’re more static,” Barnett says. “You have nowhere to hide (a mistake) when you’re looking at a basketball, so everything has to be absolutely spot on.” With the sheer volume of clips, you could be forgiven for missing or even not giving the proper amount of attention to some of the truly special ones, such as those commissioned as part of Sphere’s XO/Art programme. “This is the world’s biggest canvas, and so not to hand it over to some of the great visual artists of our time, I think, would be remiss of us,” Barnett says. “We make sure that we’re embracing as wide a community as possible with that programme.” Refik Anadol, whose site-specific works use machine learning, kicked off the programme on September 1 with Machine Hallucination: The Sphere . It even incorporated real-time wind and gust speed data. Dawn, Noon, Night . On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, London-based artist David Oku debuted Vivid Dreams: A Colourful Celebration of MLK’s Legacy . Shanghai native Shan Jiang contributed An Inked Flight , complete with flying dragons and paper lanterns, for Lunar New Year. For the Love of Money resembled some of the black-and-grey fine-line tattoos he has inked on the likes of Eminem and Travis Barker. Magazine-shredding artist Movana Chen on using paper to ‘make love’ Eric Haze, the former street artist who designed the logos for Public Enemy and Beastie Boys, tagged Sphere at the end of his piece Atmosphere . And Robert Provenzano, professionally known as CES, brought New York’s “wild style” graffiti to the exosphere with his Gameplan . Since then, Sphere has debuted Mirror of the Mind , a meditative, crystal-based installation by Krista Kim, who has been called one of the most influential people in the metaverse, as well as Now Forever , which resembles a Crayola-infused brain scan, from Italian multidisciplinary artist Michela Picchi. The Exosphere’s art is a passion project for James Dolan, the New York billionaire who controls the New York Knicks basketball team, New York Rangers ice hockey team, New York venues Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, among other holdings, and oversees Sphere Entertainment as its executive chairman and chief executive officer. Seductive, orgasmic or sickly, unsettling? ‘In-between’ portraits “He has a vision where we are giving back to the community, that we are sharing,” Barnett says. “We’re not just bombarding you with advertisements. We are creating spectacle and wonder and allowing people to enjoy it as opposed to being consistently sold to.” That vision plays into what Barnett says is Sphere’s overall programming philosophy. “We want to entertain you. We want to make sure that you’re intrigued to keep following, to keep playing along with us.” Moving forward, look for Sphere to continue to show off during big moments. In addition to the commissioned pieces, Super Bowl week saw all 57 Super Bowl rings get their moment on the Exosphere. And, in a break from the way it is normally programmed in advance, much like a TV network complete with advertising breaks, the Exosphere was updated live during the game with every score change. The future also will see more of Emoji, just not as often as you might expect. “We’re being a little more judicious now about how we use our Emoji friend, so that we can really make those moments very special,” Barnett says. “There are lots of things that we will be doing and we will continue to do with the Emoji. Because when you’ve got a hit, you want to continue working it. But we never want to outstay our welcome, either.”