Episode 151 - ABBA Voyage (2022-) (with Ian Comley)

ABBA Voyage (2022-).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

For this brand new podcast episode, Chris and Alex are delighted to discuss the spectacle and staging of virtual holograms with Ian Comley, VFX Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic and part of the creative team that brought the ABBA Voyage (2022-) musical experience to life. Over three years in the making, ABBA Voyage uses computer-generated imagery to (re)imagine the long-retired Swedish group for 21st century audiences. The show combines sophisticated de-aging techniques to craft the illusion of the band’s 1979 selves, combined with re-recorded vocals and a contemporary light show. Topics include the fluctuating role of nostalgia in the ‘retro’ creation of ABBA’s virtual ‘abbatars’ and the speculative aesthetic of contemporary musical concerts; the ethics of virtual holography when combined with digitally-mediated posthumous performance; the myth of the photographic ‘close-up’ rendered in computer graphics; questions of likeness, liveness, and duration in the construction of an immersive concert; and the complex status of ABBA Voyage as a feature-length animation that negotiates the musical star as a computerised base asset.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

  • Bode, Lisa. 2006. “From Shadow Citizens to Teflon Stars: Reception of the Transfiguring Effects of New Moving Image Technologies.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1, no. 2 (2006): 173–189.

  • Bode, Lisa. 2010. “No Longer Themselves? Framing Digitally Enabled Posthumous “Performance”,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 4 (Summer): 46–70.

  • King, Barry. 2011. “Articulating Digital Stardom,” Celebrity Studies 2, no. 3: 247–262.

  • Ng, Jenna. 2021. The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

  • Ng, Jenna, and Nick Bax. 2023. “Spooker Trouper: ABBA Voyage, Virtual Humans and the Rise of the Digital Apparition.” Paragraph 46, no. 2: 160-175.

  • Thomas, Sarah. 2019. “The star in VR.” Celebrity Studies 10, no. 4: 453–468.

PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantPIXAR, CITY, EUROPE, ANTHROPOMORPHISM, FOODComment