The living dead: we can watch ‘Janis Joplin’ perform or reunite the Beatles, but who are the real winners here?

Advances in digital technology mean that avatars are ever more realistic, and zombie concerts are coming our way. Exciting as it might be to witness the Fab Four, or Maria Callas on stage, I’d rather have flesh and blood live experiences any day.

It seems that AI’s powers – terrifyingly – know no bounds. But can it raise the dead? Here’s what Avatar concert producer Unit1 Studio’s CEO Barney Wragg said in a recent interview. “We [are] talk[ing] about using AI to simulate the way that tears evaporate in your eye between blinks, or subcutaneous blood flow, so that when one of our [digital] characters laughs or opens their mouth or smiles, areas of their flesh will change colour as it would do in a real human”. Digital avatars are already part of our entertainment landscape – from Tupac and Abba to Maria Callas – but now that an avatar’s cheeks can change colour mid-set, is it game over for humans?

Wragg last week reported a massive investment in his company to make hyper-realistic avatar-entertainment. Unit1 plans to roll out avatars of musicians living – and dead – so that the success of Abba Voyage is just the start of a slew of “hybrid” concerts. In other words, flesh-and-blood audiences paying massive amounts of human money to witness a very expensive LED screen showing phantom musicians in the 21st century’s equivalent of the magic lantern. (The tech is a 2D illusion: you think you’re seeing Abba’s Agnetha in 3D, but you’re not; it’s all just a new-fangled but fundamentally old-fashioned trick of the light.)

And the frontiers for Wragg and his team are endless: recreating Live Aid, Hendrix at Woodstock, the Beatles at the Cavern Club, and doing so in multiple locations simultaneously.

It’s the logical endpoint of a culture of nostalgia epitomised for Wragg by his teenage nephew, who, having discovered and fallen in love with Janis Joplin’s music, wanted to see her live, but the unfortunate fact of her death in 1970 meant that this was impossible. But why should that tiny hiccup be an impediment? Unit1 can bring her back, potentially resurrecting all your other favourites of yesteryear in what Wragg calls “time-travel tourism” – assuming that they receive permission from the musicians’ estates.

Wragg talks about the tech not in terms of its creative use, but its documentary capacity: “We are re-engineering a moment in time, absolutely to fidelity. It’s not a case of interpreting what somebody said, it’s just representing exactly what they said.” Unit1’s vision goes far beyond any of classical music’s attempts to recreate the musical cultures of the past with historically informed performance practice. Wragg talks in terms of absolute fidelity to what happened, a perfect simulacrum not of a song, a symphony, or an aria, but of an actual “moment in time”, rendered as precisely as possible, to be repeated indefinitely.

Wragg admits there are limits: “We have been approached where people say, ‘What about if this person met this star?’ We’ve said, ‘Look, you’re straying into a world of fiction.’” But surely, seeing Joplin’s avatar perform as if she were still alive today is the height of science fiction. Isn’t fiction the whole point of the technology? Why not imagine Freddie Mercury singing with Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole with Marlene Dietrich, or how about Mozart in a keyboard battle with Beethoven?

The problem with Mozart, Beethoven or Bach, say, is that they didn’t, alas, leave much of a digital record to work with to make their avatars, unlike Abba or Joplin. As opposed to recreating, faithfully, actual moments in time, this seems to actually be about making advanced-level digital exhibits that people will pay to see every night in spaces once reserved for human musicians to perform in but that will now be consecrated to these digital homunculi: zombie concerts, opiates for an apocalyptically nostalgic age. Try throwing an apple at the stage; try interrupting the setlist; try making them perform an encore; try to get their autographs; try to find empathy and connection with this digital playback.

Or maybe I should get with the programme and embrace the theme-park immersion of this wondrous age of technology that helps keep us stuck in a permanently perfected past. But if Unit1 could find enough digital traces out there in the ether, I’d love to have been there for the premiere of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in Vienna in 1786; to have witnessed Louise Bertin’s Fausto in Paris in 1831; to be overwhelmed by Mahler’s Eighth Symphony when it was first performed in Munich in 1910; or to have been in the crowd for the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913 to find out if there really was a riot at the ballet.

But here’s the thing. Even if Unit1 could accurately represent not only the performers but every detail of these events, it would still be meaningless as a creative project. Classical music, at least, is all about interpreting what somebody wrote in the context of our times, not recreating the same thing night after night. That’s true time travel, and there’s no AI required.

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This week Tom has been listening to: Keir GoGwilt and friends’ The Zarabanda Variations, which takes a simple question – what are the origins of the dance known as the sarabande in European repertoires? – and discovers and unearths a network of stories that connect Africa to the Caribbean, European salons to the realities of colonialism, and turns all of those histories into a teeming, thrumming, retuned present tense.