Photo courtesy of Sonar.
With a bustling conference auditorium to the left, hordes of revelers stomping around to the right, and the scorching Spanish summer sun up above, the isolation of Sonar’s 360º audiovisual dome was a welcome relief. Lying on a beanbag in a cold dark room is perhaps the obvious reaction to spending the day being warned about the different ways in which AI is going to obliterate the human race, but in terms of spectacle, this cool bubble of sound and color set itself apart from the rest of Sonar’s attractions.
A trip to Sonar360º, a dome 19m in diameter and 9m high, involves an hour or so of short films projected onto the inside of the dome’s convex roof. Viewers duly prostrate themselves beneath the artist’s creations and are thus allowed within the audiovisual experience, each work enveloping them in 3D sound and color. Immersive is the operative word here. After an hour-long assault on the senses, I felt transported from the grime of the city to desolate planets, lucid landscapes and secret, alien depths. While some of the visual clarity and HD definition is lost in the vastness of the projection, the 360º dome offers an entirely new perspective on the audiovisuals, subsuming you into them whether you like it or not.
Photo courtesy of Sonar.
Six short works are played back to back if you stay for the full reel as I did, each of which explores a new, but often related, theme. Créatures by Vincent Houzé and Dave & Gabe took us through an otherworldly deep sea landscape filled with bizarre sea creatures, recognizable in their tentacles and streaming limbs, but strange enough to be unsettling. As an augmented reality experience, this ticked all the boxes. I felt guided through an antique land—Virgil taking me to the innermost circle—filled with mirages and looming jeopardy, oceanic depths and hellish black abysses, with the eponymous creatures growing more unreal, more ghostly, as we moved deeper.
It also had the effect of conjuring visions of outer-space, something the depths of the sea are often said to evoke. It wasn’t easy to tell, therefore, when Créatures had ended and the following piece, Nebulae, had started. The latter was a more literal galactic exploration: a rocket ship ride skyward from mountains to the stars, past supernovas and plasma storms, showing the elegance and terror of outer space in all its fear and grandeur, while also mimicking the subterranean world that came before it.
Nebulae and Créatures both portray the ideal subject matter for this kind of immersive medium, as the enormous projection showed just how distant and unrecognizable our universe is. The following piece, which was also set in that final frontier, continued this theme, but in a way that was a little closer to home, especially given we were watching it at Sonar. Sphere was soundtracked by thumping techno of the blackest variety, as we explored the many rooms of a spaceship in orbit around the Earth: an intergalactic nightclub complete with strobes and choreographed light shows. However, like the void outside it, this club was empty, giving the whole piece a lonely, detached tone, only reinforced by the visions of a barren planet that ended the film.
Photo courtesy of Sonar.
The music in Sphere was probably the most compelling of the entire reel, the kind of techno that grabs you by the ears and shakes you with disorientating fury. This was certainly one of the best environments you could choose to listen to the genre—a dark room, with carefully placed surround sound and visuals that ebb and flow with the music. Factors, created by Daito Manebe and Satoshi Horii, also used sound to devastating effect. Here, gritty, glitchy footwork-esque techno complimented visuals that seemed to stream and burst, as ribbons and hair follicles danced across every inch of the dome above. The intensity of the music went from dread-inducing industrial beats to the kind of euphoric breaks that only techno can provide. This too was mirrored in the kaleidoscopic visuals, which sometimes had the satisfying order of a Windows XP screen saver, before suddenly threatening to reach out the screen and strangle those of us lying below.
Immersion and absorption: these were the dome’s defining features. And this highlights the importance of the space itself, as much as the art I watched there. For this was not something that could be enjoyed on your sofa with tinny speakers and fuzzy video. Neither was it something you could catch up on afterwards on a computer screen (I tried, for reference, but it felt like watching an entirely different show). What the dome creates is a 3D soundworld with visuals to match: every light, beat and flash placed with the utmost precision, a cascading shower of light and sound contained within that black bubble.
Harry Stott.
Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.