| Summary: | This article analyzes the recent popularity of “live” three-dimensional holographic performances in popular music. Holographic performers are the product of multiple human coders, typically interact with live musicians, and instigate live audience feedback. Thus they ironically celebrate a collective humanity through the seemingly artificial, and thereby provide an ephemeral and quasi-spiritual, if ultimately mechanical, sense of co-presence. Focusing on the well-publicized holographic “resurrection” of Tupac Shakur at the 2012 Coachella Music Festival and on performances by crowd-sourced Japanese vocaloid Hatsune Miku, this article posits that, rather than signaling a loss of human agency, holographic performances reinforce collective human consciousness and underline a new form of techno-spiritualism.
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