The Open-Ended Future of Music and Fashion
Artist Sutu talks to Rumfoords about bringing The Weeknd Experience to life and the similarities between musicians and fashion designers in the virtual experience era.
The Travis Scott Fortnite event changed everything.
Sutu, a.k.a. artist and designer Stuart Campbell, and the rest of the team at The Wave, the virtual concert company, were working on a pitch for what would become The Weeknd Experience.
But when they saw the now-iconic Travis Scott event, they went back to the drawing board.
“We were like, ‘Whoa, we’ve really got to push it to the next level now,’” Sutu said.
The result was an interactive virtual concert whose scale rivals that of a video game.
“It turned into way more content, a lot more scene changes, transforming the whole environment for every single song,” Sutu said. “We just packed in so much more content that it was a crazy challenge for everyone.”
The Weeknd Experience, which was streamed live on TikTok on August 7, is just the latest virtual splash from Sutu.
Sutu has been a central figure at the intersection of technology and storytelling for a decade and a half, beginning with his interactive comic NAWLZ and continuing with his work in VR for Marvel and Disney.
But he’s now at the forefront of the white hot virtual concert scene.
“All the feedback from the artists has been phenomenal,” Sutu said. “They can’t believe what can be done.”
According to Sutu, what makes the virtual concert such a powerful experience is the open-ended nature of it.
“It’s really becoming a big video game,” Sutu said. “The artists thought it would be, like, you send a creative brief and, like a music video, you come back two months later and you see the content. Whereas we’re really trying to create this participation between performer and audience and have that effect the outcome.”
Directed by Daniel Sierra and produced by The Wave, The Weeknd Experience pulled in more than 2 million viewers.
For The Weeknd Experience, Sutu created an opulent neon light neon-lights-bathed backdrop that makes Vegas look subdued and a drive-through runway bordered by monolithic stabbing women.
But he’s most proud of one dancer who didn’t even make it into TikTok.
“Because The Weeknd references ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ I had drawn this dancing backup singer eel girl,” Sutu said. “She had a big eel for head, which was really wild. For some reason it didn’t make the cut!”
Sutu’s also worked on virtual concerts for John Legend, Jean-Michel Jarre and “Ready Player One.”
The virtual concert boom is opening doors to wild new possibilities for visual artists like Sutu.
“Every time you watch it, it could be different, different inputs and different responses,” Sutu said. “In the Weeknd Experience, the audience could vote for him to lick a frog, and if he did lick the frog it gets really trippy.”
For Sutu, the future of music is finding a way to bridge these real-time engines and the artists’ physical performances.
“In the future, we’ll go to a concert and hold up our phones or look through our AR glasses and see the 3D artwork floating all around you,” Sutu said.
Virtual fashion is on a parallel track to virtual concerts, another realm where Sutu is elevating the visions of artists whose work he admires and extending their visions in open-ended storytelling.
“Because it’s virtual it defies laws of gravity,” Sutu said. “These garments can act in ways that fashion can’t, we’re not limited to the laws of the natural world. Using technology to evoke that magic is wonderful.”
This summer, Sutu collaborated with Portuguese fashion media designer Damara Inglês for the immersive Fabric of Reality show.
“It’s very similar to the collaborations with musicians,” Sutu said. “They have their visions, and then we have our own technological experience, and it’s finding cool ways to elevate their vision with our expertise.”
“The whole environment feels like you’re in some crazy giant jellyfish world and everything is elastic and moving around you,” Sutu said.
Like musicians and the music industry, Sutu believes that fashion designers and the fashion industry are on the verge of a creative breakthrough.
“I think it’s just sparking the neurons,” Sutu said. “They’re starting to see all their wildest dreams for fashion that’s not defined by the laws of physics of our world…suddenly you can cut those strings and go crazy with your imagination.”
Where fashion takes it next is open-ended.
“It’s opened up another portal.”