ALEX LUKAS
2023 - Now
Fanzines and Pamphlets University of California at Santa Barbara CONTACT FOLLOW
Las Vegas, Nev.
The Sphere is a twenty-four-story-tall orb rising from Las Vegas’ near-strip sprawl like a celestial body. I visited a few months ago and was surprised by its ability to retain my gaze. The Sphere is both shed and duck. In a city built on distraction and misdirection, where visitors’ eyes are constantly and conspicuously pulled in a thousand directions, this giant 360-screen immediately had (and held) my attention. It’s mesmerizing. It’s enchanting. My 18th-floor hotel room overlooked the Sphere, and I spent several hours intently watching as the display cycled between animations. In no particular order, I saw blue-green vortices that reminded me of wormholes or abscesses, a smiling yellow emoji, two gem-like patterns, a whale gently swimming through the ocean, a lava lamp, something that looked like a rainbow-hued cousin of Gritty, an enticement to visit the human-like robots housed inside the dome, ripples in a fuchsia pond, the Grateful Dead logo, and the moon. An animated basketball for March Madness was the most convincing graphic of the lot. Late that first night, I saw a human eyeball, but it was looking away from me and toward the northwest horizon.
I didn’t see it again until the next day. Continued below
I quickly became a devotee and began to imagine the Sphere as the setting for any number of fantastical narratives. In one, it becomes an omniscient oracle. The Sphere’s pulsations are interpreted as instructions by death cults, shady intelligence agencies, and tech-industry robber barons, all convinced of the orbs’ prophetic nature. Power struggles ensue. Or the Sphere is cast in a sitcom, where the giant emoji animation delivers a string of wisecracks and one-liners to passersby until someone teaches it the true meaning of love (this story arc could also go dark, with the emoji bullying tourists and goading accolades to enact violence on enemies, real and imagined). I can picture an hour-long prestige drama featuring a human child raised entirely by AI inside the Sphere. After a fulfilling childhood spent wandering virtual recreations of Earth’s splendor and learning about science, art, and philosophy, an unexpected power failure “kills” the child’s it-takes-a-village sentient robotic caregivers. After the food runs out, our protagonist heroically pops the emergency hatch that they’ve been warned never to touch, only to find a Max Max-style post-apocalyptic tundra outside (admittedly, a predictable ending). Alternatively, the child might emerge into a society that has been watching their upbringing via a live stream on the Sphere's exterior for the past decade (à la the Truman Show). Season 2 (assuming the program is renewed) will explore the audience’s reticence to rescue the child after the catastrophic power failure. Or perhaps the child emerges unnoticed into modern-day Vegas and is forced to wander the Strip panhandling.
Is it telling that all of these stories tilt a little dystopian? Continued below
It’s worth noting that Vegas’ other iconic geometric structure, the Luxor Hotel and Casino, is filled with its own type of darkness: the pyramid-shaped building, itself a faux-tomb, houses an exhibition of Titanic memorabilia and an iteration of the pseudo-scientific Bodies exhibition, featuring “meticulously dissected authentic human specimens” - a multi-tiered death spectacle with tickets starting at $34.00 per person.
Las Vegas Boulevard is a surprisingly pedestrian-friendly and eminently walkable stretch of desert, but the Sphere exerts an uncanny gravitational pull. It beckons, and, importantly, it beckons away from the Strip. While a second-story footbridge funnels visitors directly into the Sphere from the Venetian, you can also approach from street level along Sands Avenue. The display, however, loses some of its effect when viewed at close range and from below. Slight misalignments in the LED “pixels” are apparent, and much of the imagery becomes unrecognizable. Still, at its base, people gather to watch - families, couples, small gaggles of older men, me - all basking in the Sphere’s glow.
The screen occasionally goes blank for a second or two between animations, turning into an inky void suddenly darker than the night sky. This black hole briefly snaps me back to focus and shakes me from the Sphere’s hypnotic spell, but the luminescence inevitably returns and quickly sucks me back in.
2019 - 2022 2016 - 2018 2011 - 2015
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