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Las Vegas's Sphere, owned by Sphere Entertainment Company and designed by global entertainment architecture firm Populous, is one of the most transformative spaces I’ve ever been in—and Dead & Company’s “Dead Forever” residency, one of the most altering experiences. As a lover of art and music (and with a particular distaste for our increasingly tech-driven creative ecosystem), I would’ve rolled my eyes at the notion of a digital globoid conjuring a spiritual experience. And as a self-proclaimed Vegas regular (I’ve gone four times in the past year alone), I’m grateful to have experienced a variety of the city’s entertainment venues with both glee and scrutiny, growing increasingly fascinated by the city’s distinctly strange ironies and hypocrisies. So I must admit that when Sphere Entertainment Co. first announced this ambitious new property last year, I questioned what yet another explosion of color and lights—not to mention, a $2.3 billion undertaking—would add to the already hyperbolic extravagance of The Strip.
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I felt especially conflicted about its lineup of artists: rock band U2, founded in Dublin in the 1970s, debuted Sphere’s opening with its “UV Achtung Baby Live” show from September 2023 to March 2024, which was interpolated with a four-show mini residency from 1980s American rock band Phish in October. It was followed by a summer-long residency from Dead & Company, a union between former Grateful Dead members and new additions including John Mayer, then the current residency of American rock band the Eagles, which opened this past Friday, September 20, and will run through February of 2025. After all, situating these legendary bands in a “data sculpture” driven by “next-generation technologies” felt disconcerting and contrived. But when I experienced the Las Vegas Sphere for myself this summer, I realized I could not have been more wrong. It’s not just about the fact that Sphere is the world’s largest spherical structure, that its 580,000-square-foot LED Exosphere can display 1 billion colors at once, that the 160,000 speakers beneath the screen pioneer cutting-edge audio, that it can conjure any imagery or sound with unmatched precision and vibrance. It’s about the otherworldly sensation that occurs when these forces meet: The visual, sonic, and spatial cacophony challenged and completely transformed my preconceived notion of the ability of a space to bring music to life.
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Entering Sphere feels like entering the depths of a whale’s stomach — while I expected to walk straight to my seat upon entering, I was shocked by the magnitude of the arena, which contained concession stands and the likes of any other music venue before reaching the actual concert space: a smaller dome at the core of the structure. This space contained 17,600 immersive seats enhanced by an infrared haptic sound system and environmental effects (the 4D effects like breezes alone completely removed me from the sweltering 110-degree Vegas evening.) “I doubted it as a performance space at first,” agrees Sam Pattinson, cofounder of multimedia creative agency Treatment Studio and creative director of the residency. “The scale is beyond anything imaginable, and I thought it would overpower the performance, which is buried all the way at the bottom.” Treatment Studio’s other cofounder, Willie Williams, U2’s longtime creative director, notes that it is Sphere’s structure that allows for spatial manipulation through videography. “Corners are how our minds navigate space—they show where a room ends, but when we remove the corners, we can artificially mutate the space into a cylinder or a landscape that goes on to infinity, and your brain just buys it. ” The space allows videographic experimentation to craft unprecedented levels of immersion, blurring the line between videography and reality. The only reference I can think of is the fictional arena in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, when the tributes are caged into a dome-shaped environment and only realize its digitally simulated barriers when Peeta crashes into an invisible screen separating them from the external world—though my experience in Sphere was far less dystopian.
Dead & Company’s show opened with complex videography that displaced the audience’s sense of time and place, projecting a shot of the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco where the Grateful Dead resided, which pulled out to reveal the Aquatic Park, the Golden Gate, and the rest of the Bay horizon. “John Mayer, who came up with the whole creative premise of the videography, really wanted to transport the audience to different chapters of the band’s history and enter new worlds together,” Pattinson shares. As the shot pulled out and clouds receded, we traveled through the earth’s atmosphere until we floated amidst Earth-orbiting satellites. “I had never seen such a reaction to a piece of content. It’s quite a long piece, and it gets more and more unbelievable as the space station comes overhead. I remember the elation—almost squeaking—in grown men,” Pattinson laughs. “It was a really powerful way to open [the show].”
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Throughout the show, the digital canvas of Sphere bridged the past and present, continuing the band’s experimentation with digital art in multimedia environments since their inception. “The band is explorative so they’re not afraid to try new stuff,” Pattinson recalls. “But we simultaneously brought back recognizable brand moments from the ’60s and ’70s for our fans. Tie-dyes and spirals were especially effective at engaging the audience.” Art Nouveau–psychedelic–inspired posters in the ’60s, which were created by American artist Stanley Mouse, an early adopter of MacPaint, swirled and engulfed us in the crowd. The visual wizardry, coupled with improvisational instrumentals, also harkened back to their Acid Tests days, where the Dead interpolated songs with hiatuses of silence, filling the void with a cacophony of lights and incoherence. We even revisited the Dead’s iconic rooftop show at Cornell University, bringing the two-dimensional, black-and-white photos I had seen in my university’s 1977 yearbooks to life. “I loved watching people just trying to figure out what they’re looking at. There was an intellectual thrill to it,” Williams reflects.
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One of my favorite songs of the show was “Terrapin Station,” which meditates on the unfolding of untapped potential and imagination, during which the screen swept across a fluorescent mountain sunset, quite literally bringing the lyricism to life in new dimensions. A row of dancing bears emerged and began marching in a spiral around us, duplicating into hundreds and thousands of bears, skulls, peace signs, flying eyes, and windows with live feed footage of the band members spiraling into a visual tornado. “It’s like drugs for people who don't do drugs,” Williams laughs. “In fact, we had semi-serious conversations about suggesting people to attend sober. Because we didn’t know how it would be for people to be tripping in that space…. It would almost be too much.”
The dialogue between historic references and contemporary reinterpretations was especially compelling due to the live feed at every show. “It was a little worrying that something could go wrong if there’s a problem with the video. We would get the setlist the day before and then allocate the bits of video to the songs and tempo,” Pattinson shares. Abigail Rosen Holmes, Phish’s show director and co–creative director for Sphere, adds that her team developed a loose framework of themes for each night and manipulated the visuals live in response to the music and audience. “Maintaining the primacy of the live music performance was one of our core goals. One aspect of supporting the band's wide ranging musicianship was to create content all of which could be manipulated and affected in real time, allowing the visuals to follow the band rather than dictate their performance,” she says. Though the stage was a simple square in the pit of Sphere, it didn’t feel faraway—instead, it felt like the music emitted from that small space filled and shaped the whole universe around us.
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I spoke with diehard Deadheads afterwards, who shared that they had been seated high up in the balcony to further engulf themselves in the experience. Williams notes that this was the case for U2 as well. “When we were rehearsing, Bono would whisper from the top row. For a performer, intelligibility of speech is always the hardest thing, but you could hear him like you were right next to him,” he remarks. “He jokes that it was his first concert where fans would come in and rush to the back,” he laughs.
In a paradoxical way, Sphere’s ability to consume the audience almost subverts contemporary fan culture and democratizes the concert experience—the urgency of procuring tickets before already inflated prices escalate, the long lines of fans camping outside venues to claim their spots in the pit, the sheer quantity and quality of TikToks that make me feel like I’ve attended the whole Eras Tour (every night, in every country too.) The visual and sonic dialogue between the audience and the artist is distinctly singular—together in a way that I’ve never experienced in entertainment. “There was something extraordinary about being in this gigantic planetarium type thing that feels like VR but where you’re with other people. VR is usually a very reticent and solitary experience but Sphere makes it intimate,” Williams remarks. “What it brought up in people was really profound—people were having emotional and spiritual experiences,” Pattinson adds. “That was the goal here: for people to forget about technology.”
Having just attended Lady Gaga’s “Jazz & Piano” residency at MGM’s Dolby Live the day prior to “Dead Forever,” the juxtaposition between these shows, both housed at two of the biggest, brightest, and most lucrative establishments on The Strip, opened my eyes to the crux of Sphere’s success. Gaga’s show transported the audience with music, stagecraft, and fashion that paid homage to vintage Vegas—but in the intimate theater, there was still a clear wall between the viewer and the performer, a clear sense of the actual time and place we were still in. The audience was there to see the artist, to enjoy her performance. While concerts abide by the rules of reality and fame, Sphere disregards and subverts those confines, actually engulfing the audience into the artist’s music and vision, crafting a shared experience.
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But in our culture of celebrity mania, where close-up TikToks of pop girlies occupy an unprecedented amount of media space, where superfans travel the world for a worshipped artist—I left wondering how the format of Sphere could be used for a contemporary pop star. “I’m not really sure how it could work for a show that requires a lot of people and space and choreography,” Pattinson reflects. “The typical runway a pop star walks down and does their choreography on wouldn’t work, because the more you approach the bleachers the more invisible you become to the audience.” “But we’ve only scratched the surface,” Williams adds. Josephine Vaccarello, EVP, Live, of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, adds that immersive concert films, allowing viewers to relive the very concert, are soon to come. “We just opened V-U2 An Immersive Concert Film, which immortalizes U2’s history-making residency in a way that only Sphere can. This type of innovation—using Sphere’s technology so fans feel like they’re at a live show—is just the beginning.”
In many ways, Sphere embodies the Vegas paradox: a constructed world that seduces its visitors with novelty and artifice, offering a reprieve from the real world. The tension is aptly conveyed in U2’s show, when the videography dissipates, as if the dome were disintegrating, to reveal the chaos, frenzy, and reality of the surrounding city. “Bono wanted the space to disappear in this climax—we wanted to end the show and reveal what Las Vegas outside really was,” Williams recalls. “I remember thinking he wanted a fantastical video of The Strip, but he said he wanted exactly as it really was, the parking lot and all, the city spreading out outside. He really wanted it to go back in time until it was a desert, because it really says a lot about what Las Vegas is. It’s totally inappropriate for the city to exist in the middle of the desert.” Sphere’s financial, technological, and cultural underpinnings aptly embodies this very paradigm, of a city that has carved its own brand of architecture in the cannon of 20th-century design, from postmodernism to iconism, yet witnesses some of the most dramatic bankruptcies, mergers, and acquisitions in American history. It embodies the architectural backbone of Vegas’s prolificity in its short existence: the constant cycle of demolition and redesign, or investing in and inventing novelty and grandiosity to entice entertainment culture’s insatiable demand. (Right now, the Bellagio’s 2024 expansion and the Venetian’s $1.5 billion overhaul are in the works.) Naturally, Sphere’s success begs the question of how long it will remain unprecedented—or rather, as a firm believer in its longevity, I wonder how it will evolve to stay unprecedented.
“Sphere is redefining the future of live entertainment, setting a new bar for what an immersive experience can look, sound, and feel like. With each new band and artist, the venue, and what it’s capable of, continues to evolve,” says Vaccarello. So now that the arena has permanently shifted and paved the groundwork for the future of the concert experience: How will other venues and entertainment cultures around the world adapt and challenge themselves to emulate the Sphere experience? And once 4D immersion is ubiquitous in concerts, how will Sphere withstand Vegas’s proclivity toward demolition and reinvention, and, by extension, entertainment culture’s insatiable hunger for novelty? “It has so much potential that can be unlocked as more minds come together,” Williams reflects.
