Case study

WhoMadeWho World Tour

Istanbul, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, Santiago de Chile, Copenhagen and more

A sphere above the band. Visuals that actually listen.

Here's a quiet secret about most concert visuals: they run on a clock, and the band plays along.

WhoMadeWho don't. The Copenhagen trio is a live act in the truest sense. A track can run long one night and short the next, and nobody on stage is watching a stopwatch. So when BIG designed an inflatable sphere to hang above them on their world tour, the tricky question was never what it should look like. It was how an image could keep up with musicians who never play anything the same way twice.

What we built

‍The object

BIG, the Bjarke Ingels Group, designed the sphere: inflatable, floating above three silver pods in front of a wide LED wall, and a descendant of the studio's earlier balloon projects, SKUM and THE ORB at Burning Man. It's a beautiful object and a demanding canvas. No edges, no corners, no straight lines to cut against, and anything flat you wrap around it looks exactly like that.

The visual system

Our part is what happens on its surface. Not a film running to timecode, but a visual system that responds to the band's tracks in real time. EyeMix Studio in Los Angeles headed the visuals with AI-assisted tools, and Christopher Mulligan animated. Three teams, one image, and the band in charge of the tempo.

The tour

Istanbul kicked off the tour on 11th November 2023. Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and Santiago de Chile followed, before the band came home to Copenhagen for a sold-out night at the Forum. Club, arena or festival field, the ritual before every set is the same: the sphere inflates, the system boots up, and the content adapts to whatever ceiling it's given.

The challenge

An object designed by architects still has to travel, go up and come down again, city after city, and look just as good in Paris as in Los Angeles. The visuals could never be a film, because nobody on this tour performs to a timeline. The system had to listen, set after set, with nobody at a desk pressing play.

By the last track, nobody in the crowd can tell the sound from the sphere anymore. Which was the whole point of making one thing instead of two.