In the final moments of Stephen Spielberg’s 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence, android boy David brings his “mother” Monica back to life for a single, bewildering day. People think this scene is sentimental, but it actually underlines the film’s dark central point: David can never be a real boy, and the bizarre and cruel resurrection of Monica only reinforces his intrinsic inhumanity.
This came to mind on Thursday night, as I snuck in late to Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s “concert in hologram” with legendary soprano Maria Callas.
I wasn’t the only one late. Callas died in 1977, and she appears here via “cutting-edge holographic technology”, according to the program. The hologram – which uses projectors and motion capture technology to create a 3D image of Callas – interacts with the audience without speaking directly to us; she motions to conductor Daniel Schlosberg, who motions back. She pauses for applause even after any real applause has died off. It’s a gimmick, of course – highly complicated technically, cobbled and reconstituted and projected into almost seamless life.
We are meant to be charmed, and yet I found it not just unsettling but profoundly depressing. Callas was most famous for her fulsome emotional connection to her material, an ability to marry musical phraseology and fine vocal technique to psychological verisimilitude. Her performances were, above all, soulful, deeply humanist; she was loved because we saw ourselves in her. Callas the Copy is the inverse of this, an ersatz simulacrum of a long dead diva – a most callous Callas.
The voice is there, mercifully. Callas’s richness of tone, her dazzling range, that ability to make virtuosity seem a perfectly natural emanation of the self, fills Hamer Hall with conviction. So much so that you can almost trick yourself into believing she’s present. But the lip-synching technology, and the faintly blurry figure itself, create an uncanny valley that resists full immersion. The energy in the room is not just muted, it’s moribund.
The MSO musicians were shrouded in shadow, and Callas shone in the centre of the stage like a precious stone. Arriving after the show had started, I had the uncomfortable sensation that the rest of the audience were also a simulation; that I’d somehow stepped into a computer program or virtual reality display. Watching Callas through other people’s phones seemed more satisfying to me than looking at the stage, in a strange loop of unreality.
Maybe this grappling with the insubstantial is just a teething problem with the tech. These kinds of virtual performance are only on the rise, from ABBA’s Voyage in the UK to Kiss’s just announced “immortal avatars”, coming soon. Perhaps this kind of performance will improve enough for us to forget how weird and monstrous it all is. But a part of me hopes not. It’s one thing for us to luxuriate in nostalgia for the things we’ve lost – to spend whole weekends listening to recordings of Callas’s finest arias, for example – but to trick ourselves into thinking we’re progressing boldly into the future by indulging in gimmickry seems dangerous to me.
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My response may seem like the quaint ravings of a luddite in no time at all. But one of the key elements of opera that gives it such power is the physical presence of the singer in the room, the way an extraordinary artist can move you with the vibrations of their voice. Deluding ourselves that a hologram – even when they become so lifelike they’re indistinguishable from the real thing – can ever replace actual artists can only lead to further decline of an artform that’s already dying off.
We might, like David recreating Monica for his own emotional entertainment, use the greats of the past as our future playthings. The one thing we won’t be able to resurrect is our own humanity.
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Maria Callas: A Concert in Hologram will travel to the Dunstan Playhouse in Adelaide on 9 December and Perth Concert Hall on 13 December