ABBA Voyage

I will admit: I am scared of my Google Home and my Amazon Alexa, I am scared of ChatGPT, Her is a horror film to me. Where is The Cloud, who is Siri, what is AI? I think there is something uneasy about the immateriality of all this technological development. Where are the bodies? A body is real, you can see it, touch it, sense it. It has presence, it is fixed. You can place it in space, guage its distance. I do not know how much a gigabyte weighs, or how it moves through the world. Admitting this feels strange. It functions like a secret, it is slightly undesirable. It also feels like I am privileging THE BODY, as an instinct. In a way that doesn’t offer explanation or justification. I fear and dislike Alexa/Google/Siri because they are disembodied voices that haunt my kitchen/bedroom/phone.

I am pulling all of this out from the back of my head, holding it up for inspection. Do I fear Alexa or do I fear what I cannot see? Do I hate technological advancement (on principle, like a luddite), or is this about the primacy of embodiment? Is Alexa’s disembodiement threatening to me because I fear she might be some Cthulu-style eldrich entity, a second away from a mask-off tentacle moment? Or does a computer’s sophisticated neural network somehow threaten my humanity? Is my humanity that fragile? (It must be, because I cannot really articulate what it is in any meaningful way). How would I feel if Alexa actually HAD a body? Would she be less threatening? How would a body make the weirdness of tech more assimilable? Is the bodilessness a shortcut to omniscience?

CUTSCENE: I am standing in the cold, at a zebra crossing, in arse end of nowhere East London, somewhere so deep East it’s accessible by DLR. I am wearing a fur coat and there is glitter around my eyes. My breath mists in front of me. I blink up at a hulking metal stadium. It is all angles, bulging out in the middle like a takeaway container or a spaceship. Across this round belly, there are four letters in shimmering rainbow lights: A B B A . My Mum and my Aunt are calling my name, telling me to get a clip on because it is nearly snowing. They are wearing sparkly tops and shiny lipsticks.

CUTSCENE: we are in the purpose built ABBA stadium, in the weird wooden lobby. There’s something like dried flowers, ribbons, pampas grass all hanging from the ceiling. Everyone has a drink, everyone is laughing, moving, bumping up against each other in friendly ways. A group of women walk past me. They are wearing wigs and white plastic boots, shiny matching ponchos. A woman on my other side has the ends of her hair flicked out. She is wearing big yellow tinted sunglasses indoors. The woman in front of us at the bar turns to her friend and says, ‘Well everyone LOVES ABBA. That’s the thing! Everyone! LOVES! ABBA!’ They laugh in a way where they grip onto each others’ shoulders while tilting their heads back and leaning away.

CUTSCENE: I am up in the nosebleeds (the second row from the back, at the furthest right edge). The stadium is dark, there are blue lights speckled over the crowd beneath me. Wobbling rings of light descend from the ceiling, and they rotate. Everyone is quiet. There is a rumbling sound, distant music. There is smoke. There is blinding light. Rising up from the back of the stage, 4 shadows.

ABBA Voyage is a very particular thing, I think. You kind of know it before you know it. The performers are actually holograms (ABBAtars), projected onto the stage using a very high-tech expensive version of basically a Victorian magic trick. The ABBAtars are also hi-def CGI renders, their movements are based on real performances — the band members wore motion capture suits and 160 cameras tracked the movements. They appear on stage as their flawless younger selves. You are NOT allowed to take photos during the performance (this is very much emphasised and policed). The holograms function like a kind of secret. The stadium is purpose built, collapsible, designed to be packed up and shipped to a new location with as small a carbon footprint as possible. The ABBA arena’s permission expires in April 2026, I think it’s due to be replaced by a housing development. Oh, and maybe LOVE is too strong a word for it, but everyone KNOWS ABBA.

Back to the CUTSCENE: I’m there, up in the nosebleeds. I’m there, knowing the holograms are about to rise up through the smoke. I’m there, fully shitting myself at the mere thought that Alexa and my Google Home are conspiring against me in my absence. I’m there, privileging the BODY, knowing that I want the BODY, wanting my humanity to be affirmed through this centrality of the BODY. 4 shadows, A B B A, rising up through the smoke and the rumbling bass. The weird sci-fi sounds of The Visitors (a song I don’t actually know, because I only know ABBA from Mamma Mia (the film) and white people weddings, I am not actually A Fan). The heads, the shoulders, the bodies!!! The BODIES!!!!! And from my weird angle in the nosebleeds (second from the back, furthest right), the holograms look skinny flat. They are on a wonk. They are visibly two dimensional. I am seeing them on their flat edge. My Mum and my Aunt are looking at me strangely because I am crying laughing, howling actually. I bet these holograms look very spectacular if you’re at the front, down in the pit of the crowd. But I’m in the cheap seats, and they look crap. It is hysterical.

I have tossed this around in my head many times. If I am an art critic, how do I want to approach a review of ABBA Voyage? I am an art critic with an agenda, a style, a position. This could be a text about the SPECTACULAR! and the shape that large scale culture is taking in response to The Digital: everything is immersive now. I keep returning to these immersive art experiences (David Hockney’s Bigger and Closer, Frameless and the immersive Van Gogh thing near Spitalfields) hoping that at least one of them will make me want to write about post-digital affect — they never do. But ABBA Voyage feels related to these immersive large scale forms, and also related to the relentless sluice of art-mag thinkpieces about slop, AI, the enshittification of visual culture (because we keep handing slices of it off to Big Tech bros who don’t understand or value it). This could be a text where I regurgitate a conversation between two post-internet art bros that was probably published on Rhizome sometime around 2015, about how the digital spirits away the body (only to call it back, in more uncanny and synthetic forms). This could be a text where I write directly about the filthy fucking CAPITALISM of it all: over a decade of funding cuts, housing development tbc, this thing is making serious money and it’s just some tech guy pressing play on a very large .MOV file. I could write about spectres, ghosts, Victorian illusions. To write about how I am wordlessly engaging in body supremacy is actually the long way around. But there it is, it’s the most truthful version of this review.

I prioritise the body, I look for the body, I fear the bodilessness of contemporary(ish) tech. I fear a world where intelligence is vast, encompasing, singular, omniscient and omnipresent and definitely not-human. And then I went to ABBA Voyage and I saw the flat holograms and I laughed. I realised that if this was all in a body, it would be hilarious. For a body to be convincing, it has to be crap. The body is abject, the body is shit, pathetic, it is mass, it is goopy gunk. The ABBAtars are flat (crap), but they’re also too perfect (they move with tight precision, so seamlessly, they are completely poreless) — they’re not shit enough to be convincing, they’re not convincing so they’re a little bit shit. Isn’t that a delicious little oxymoron? A messy little tension to hold in a knot.

CUTSCENE: I stop laughing long enough to look around. The crowd is on their feet. Me with my Mum and my Aunt, and thousands of others (girls and Mums and Aunts and all the different kinds of women that enter our lives and love us). The stadium is actually a massive, extended family party. All of us in sparkly tops and shiny lipsticks, with glitter around our eyes. All of us dancing to Dancing Queen, holding hands, wine-drunk and belting into each others faces. The ABBAtars, the holograms, the illusion, the post-digital spectral bodies and all their crap-not-crap-enoughness — none of that actually matters. Whatever’s on stage is not important to the room, because actually, everyone does! LOVE! ABBA! and we are all having a nice time.