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Last horizon map4/7/2023 ![]() “Obviously you can’t wear green, and ABSOLUTE. Jaguar, the host of Radio 1’s new BBC Introducing Dance show, says that the recording of her Gas Tower set with fellow DJ ABSOLUTE., in front of a green screen, threw up unusual challenges. “It’s a pretty fucking crazy thing, to be honest.” “Basically they get turned into holograms, a bit like Princess Leia being projected out of RDT2 or whatever he’s called, and then they appear on the stage,” explains Shangri-La’s musical director and chief vibes master Chris Tofu. What makes a ‘virtual performance’ different from your workaday live-streamed DJ set, I hear you ask? Green screen. In 10 days’ time the stage will host virtual performances from a stellar line-up that includes Carl Cox, Fatboy Slim, Peggy Gou and Seth Troxler. Outside the first venue we visit, dance stage the Gas Tower, we hop up to sit on some bins and just take in the view. The attention to detail is staggering, even extending to the liminal spaces between the stages themselves. “They keep telling us it looks just like the real thing,” he says happily, “which is lucky as none of us have actually been.” Art director Colin Fix says he’s had similar feedback from the Shangri-La team. ![]() ![]() I follow them through a glowing blue portal and then there it is, large as life: the lightbulb-studded sign that announces you’re lost no more, that you’ve found your way to Shangri-La.Īs we wander between the festival’s four stages, I keep thinking how familiar it all feels. Next I meet the fellow avatars of some of the team who’ve spent the last few months scrambling to bring this festival to virtual life. I gingerly learn to take my first steps using the joystick which thankfully slims the chances of me tripping over my coffee table. I look down at my virtual hands in wonder, because those are the rules of entering a new reality. I pull on the headset to find myself transported to Sansar’s loading bay, which looks a little like a galactic airport concourse. Sadly my Oculus cupboards are bare so a nice man from Sansar, the Californian company behind the tech side of Lost Horizon, is despatched to my house to strap me in and send me off like Alice in pursuit of the White Rabbit. While performances will be streamed on Beatport, Twitch and YouTube, to fully explore the event you’ll need to either use a desktop PC or, if you happen to have one lying around, an Oculus Rift headset. On July 3 and 4 they’re inviting us all to attend Lost Horizon, a massive free VR event they’re calling “a real festival, in a virtual world”. The team behind Shangri-La, Glasto’s hedonistic festival-within-a-festival, believe they can, proving that you should never underestimate the ingenuity of professional party people deprived of a party. The BBC will be broadcasting classic sets all weekend, as close as you’ll get to the Pyramid stage in 2020, but what of the festival’s notorious late-night south-east corner? Surely you can’t recreate that decadent playground for the senses during life under lockdown? Social distancing does not easily lend itself to 200,000 people getting mashed in the mud. ![]() Not this year not in our new prevailing reality. Today we’d be crammed into cars, sleeping bags under our feet to make space for more booze in the boot, setting off on the slow pilgrimage to some corner of a Pilton field that is forever Glastonbury. In another, better timeline, we’d have spent yesterday trying to remember where we left our wellies. ![]()
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