Renown musician Grimes closed Fashion Week in the Decentraland metaverse with a light lit half an hour show, the first of its kind debut.
She sang in an avatar form and danced in what the organizers describe as a performance “accompanied by AI integrations.”
What that means is anyone’s guess, but there are moments when the movements are very human.
There are also glitches, showing this isn’t quite just a 3d animation, but a blending of a live human representation and her digital mirror. Though it isn’t clear whether there was a motion capture, or a mocap suit involved.
Some even joked this is just a showcase of new emotes as there were some significant extra-human repetition.
Yet compared to the Paris Hilton performance a few months ago, there has clearly been some advance.
And that’s in some ways what these performances are, of advances. Techno-art as one might call it, for this is as much technology as it is an art showcase.
With the emote jokes, it can even be a business showcase, buying these dance moves. Or dance mixes.
Compared to the days of street dance, that could potentially revive the scene itself which nowadays feels a bit quiet.
Grimes style performances could also allow you to follow along with your own real life dance moves in a blend of sorts.
Where the music is concerned, in this performance Grimes forces you to dance eventually through a chill but very vibe tone that makes you move.
Of course seeing it live would be a more refined experience, but the question is: was it better than seeing it on TV or on a Youtube video?
Compared to the latter, in 3d you get a difference experience depending on your view. Initially, we were a few steps lower and from there it felt like this could be a live performance. From the view Trustnodes has recorded above however, you can see the performance in more detail and therefore aspirations are lowered to more: what sort of AI integration was there.
As the performance itself shows, there are also different capabilities from a staging point of view.
The cost of a live performance is so high that there is a very rigid script: an elevated stage, a microphone, and the audience behind a cordon.
In a 3d digital realm, one has the opportunity to at least briefly ask what is the audience, where, what are its capabilities, and how can we increase that wow and immersive experience with these new capabilities.
That there is such opportunity suggests there is something new which allows us to experiment.
Currently we’re at the replication stage, focusing on mirroring the real world performances or displays. But people can not fly in the real world, they can not jump from high without a hitch, they can not move their vision 360, and they can not teleport anywhere in seconds.
Some of that is shown here. The stage is floating, we have to climb some stairs from which we sometime fall as they’re artificially made difficult to climb and there can be many people in exactly the same position.
Making this performance a showcase of what can be done in the present, and what likely will be possible very soon: an actual live fully dancing performance of an avatar representation.
There’s someway to go towards achieving that, and there are of course plenty who may be hesitant, hostile, or just question what they might see as replacing replication of an actual live performance.
Grimes herself ends with “try another game.” But is it a game? Games are scripted, like a movie. There is no human agency, there is no mass creation.
This is more a representation, a new medium that feels like the others, like a game with videos in it, pictures, a dancing Grimes avatar, but none of it is scripted like in an actual game where a dev studio has complete control over it.
Instead, anyone can put up whatever they want as long as they can afford to buy or rent the land and have the skills.
It’s also of course not real life, and until now the only thing we had to describe it was games, from which it has developed and is metamorphosing into something different from both real life and games: the metaverse.
Something that has just began, and something that is beginning to show how some fields can be revitalized by this new medium of creation, while new fields are born.
Like techno art, a fusion of technology and art which seems to be dawning.
