Live from the Other Side of Nowhere: Contemplating Musical Performance in an Age of Virtual Reality

In recent years VR has become an increasingly prevalent platform for musical performance—Björk, U2, Gorillaz, and even the LA Philharmonic all having taken to the virtual stage. These virtual encounters profoundly disrupt assumptions long held to be true of live music, undermining the necessity of physical and temporal co-presence, exploding our expectations of performance spaces, opening up new possibilities for performance involving avatars, and affording intimate encounters otherwise impossible in the physical world. Proceeding through a series of case studies and analyses, and drawing in equal parts on the findings of musicology, performance, film, and media and cultural studies, Live from the Other Side of Nowhere begins to pry apart the conceptual challenges that this disruptive technology poses to our understanding of the "live" as an autonomous category of musical activity.