Rethinking 'Travis Scott and Fortnite present: Astronomical' in light of Astroworld 2021
On the metaverse, sovereignty, and celebrity.
The metaverse will likely have its own celebrities, like Twitch has its own celebrities. “Ninja” and whoever else. Traditional celebrities famous for work produced before ~2012 aren’t really expected to post actively, but for millennial and gen Z celebrities, simply appearing in mainstream media is no longer enough.
Savvy consumers are familiar with the different characteristics of classic, 20th century mass-media celebrity and internet celebrity. The former walks down red carpets, the latter sits in a mansion and talks to a computer all day. Nobody knows exactly what to expect from metaverse celebrity, though.
Travis Scott is one of the foremost present day stars straddling the line between the pre-platform culture industry and its emergent, post-platform successor. The former is dying and the latter is still in its nascent stages, less than a decade old, and seemingly about to go through yet more rapid changes. Scott signs autographs, does stadium tours, and had a signature McDonalds meal — a very classic kind of celebrity gesture, the limited-run, signature consumer good — but he also gave his avatar permission to perform at the one of the first metaverse celebrity events, Travis Scott and Fortnite present: Astronomical.
For one weekend in April 2020, at the height of pandemic round one, the Fortnite game-world became the Staples Center, which as of this week has just been renamed the Crypto.com Arena ($CRO is up 92.62% over the last week). The live multiplayer experience inaugurated what tech companies hope will be a new era of popular culture, where isolated and passive media consumption is displaced by immersive multiplayer interaction in an unfamiliar virtual world. The Astronomical event itself was boring, designed to appeal to the aesthetic preferences of children, but its content was exponentially less important than the new kind of experiential form it unlocked for young users with super-plastic brains.
About halfway through Astronomical, the metaverse-Fortnite performance, avatar-Scott sings, “It ain’t a mosh pit if ain’t no injuries.” What can we understand this lyric to mean in the Fortnite context? Within the game, a user can drink potions to heal themselves. If a user becomes so injured that they die, they accept defeat and prepare for the next round of play. They can also choose to linger and look over their assailant’s shoulder, observing their progress through the rest of the round.
The divergent risks and affordances granted to a metaverse concertgoer and an in-person festival attendee were thrown into relief by the tragic deaths at the severely mismanaged Astroworld festival earlier this month. User sovereignty and IRL sovereignty have always overlapped in oblique and uneven ways, but from now on the messiness of their intertwinedness will only intensify. It seems reasonable to speculate that the way users are conceived of and treated in one channel will in turn affect how they are treated in another.
As the metaverse continues to render, elaborating itself down the line in ever more granular detail, could a real-life concertgoer be mistaken for an immortal avatar in this omnichannel blend? If not mistaken for, then conflated with, or even considered coextensive with? Premonitions of an exquisite corpse sewn together from various sections of the Playstation Terms of Service, Epic Games End User License Agreement, state laws, federal laws, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, whatever else…
I watched Astronomical for the first time recently and took notes:
Anything could be anywhere but there is no there there. Automated cameras focus in and around the island environment, scooping up all kinds of useless visual detail, stumbling upon brief moments of strange beauty seemingly by accident. These hundreds of cameras don’t need to be operated individually because the entire experience is itself an operation. Scott’s celebrity is represented by his literal physical stature, a pictorial strategy reminiscent of a couple 14th century Italian depictions of Christ on view at the Frick (Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain” [1308-1311], Barna da Siena’s “Christ Bearing the Cross, with a Dominican Friar” [ca. 1350]). Jesus is important so he is BIG. Scott’s fans refer to themselves as “ragers.” There’s a lot to be enraged about in the world today. Will the c-suite give system administrators the leeway to provide users with the ability to express rage in the metaverse?