What If Augmented Reality Wasn’t Invented—But Rediscovered?
Rebranding the performing arts for a digital-native audience by speaking their language—without compromising our own.
The 2024 Culture Next report by Spotify serves as a powerful predictor of what's in store for culture-at-large - notably the trends of consumers in the music streaming and in-person concert space. The survey surveyed 7,700 participants in the Gen Z segment (aged 15 to 24) and Millennials (aged 25 to 40), with about 500 respondents each from Spotify’s Australia and New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, U.K. and U.S. markets.
“Gen Z is craving connection more than ever — while other forms of online activities contribute to feelings of loneliness, music and podcasts are a catalyst for true connection online and In Real Life (IRL).” Young people are digitally native and have only known online living, concerts and IRL events are essential. 74% of Gen Zs have attended a concert/live music show in the last year. Even if they don’t attend concerts, nearly half of Gen Zs surveyed have attended an in-person listening party for a new album or song. Genre notwithstanding, the shared experience of listening to the same music together, even in casual spaces, helps socialize a generation plagued by loneliness and separation through a pandemic and online culture.
The performing arts industry is always looking for new ways to connect with audiences. What if there was an ad campaign that did just that? I was chatting with a few colleagues before a performance last weekend and I thought of a quick tagline:
“Performing Arts: The OG Augmented Reality”
Going into a closed space, where we’re socially required to focus - turn off our devices - excites and attracts people. Why? It’s an escape. I typically appreciate this as I manage my own jitters sitting in a chair getting through a long first act. However, during the second act, I marveled how the brilliance of the performances and creative team kept the attention of 800 rapt in the amazement of the moment. Some thing I always appreciated while watching Maria Callas in the 1958 concert in Paris: She barely moved on the stage and the entire Paris Opera audience was in awe. We’re still in awe watching the video!
All musicals are operas, not all operas are musicals.
You can argue this statement all you want, but it’s compound and I’ll defend it. For the purpose of the area of performing arts, “opera” includes “musicals”.
Opera is, at its essence, a centuries-old form of augmented reality, because it amplifies and extends our experience of the world using only the human body, music, and storytelling. And central to this augmentation is one radical, profound act: singing.
Singing is not how we normally communicate. In daily life, we speak, gesture, type, text. We share thoughts, opinions, and instructions. But in opera, communication is transformed. It is stretched, elevated, and intensified—augmented—through song. When a character sings instead of speaks, we know immediately: what they are saying matters. Their emotions cannot be contained in regular speech. Musicals may use speech to move the storyline forward, similar to sung recitative in opera. But when the song or aria begins, the voice becomes an instrument of amplification—of inner life, of feeling, of stakes.
This elevates another layer of perception to what we already know. Take an argument between lovers—in opera, that argument becomes a duet, full of musical tension and release. Their disagreement is no longer just words—it’s melody, harmony, rhythm. The emotions underneath the words are made audible, tangible, embodied. The human voice, soaring above an orchestra, becomes a kind of auditory miracle - acoustic or amplified. It literally vibrates through the audience. That is sensory augmentation at its purest.
Long before apps and screens, opera asked: What if we could feel more? Perceive more? Go beyond the ordinary? It answers with voices that defy physics and stories that defy time.
Beyond the voice, opera layers reality with everything at its disposal—costumes, sets, lighting, orchestration, movement, myth. The stage is transformed into dreamlike or hyper-real environments, and time itself is stretched as an aria lingers over a single moment of decision, heartbreak, or revelation.
Opera, then, is not a relic—it is a technology of emotion. It is immersive, multi-sensory, and radically embodied.
Everybody dance, now!
Dance transforms the human body into a vessel for heightened expression, perception, and storytelling. Just as augmented reality overlays data or visuals onto the physical world to deepen our interaction with it, dance overlays meaning, metaphor, and emotion onto movement, space, and time.
Choreography takes the body beyond its ordinary limits. A leap becomes a declaration. A stillness becomes a scream. A turn becomes the passing of time, a duet the mapping of human relationships. Dance augments what we understand a body can do, and what a body can say. Watching a dancer express sorrow without saying a word can be as vivid, if not more so, than reading a line of dialogue or hearing a song lyric. The experience is sensory, direct, and primal.
Dance also redefines space. A bare stage becomes a battlefield, a memory, a cosmos—simply by how bodies move through it. A hillside becomes a communal space of joy and exhilaration. The audience doesn’t just watch—they feel time pass, sense tension build, experience transformation. In this way, dance doesn't simulate or replicate—it amplifies. It’s an ancient human technology for immersion, one that doesn’t need screens or sensors. Just bodies, breath, and the bravery to be seen.
Dance is augmented reality because it reshapes how we perceive motion, emotion, and meaning—using the body as the original immersive device.
Poetry is a form of augmented reality because it alters the way we perceive language, time, and meaning. It doesn’t just describe the world—it reshapes it, heightens it, re-codes it. In our daily lives, we use language to function: to inform, explain, command. But poetry interrupts the linear, literal flow of reality—and in doing so, it reveals deeper truths hidden beneath the surface.
A metaphor is, in itself, a kind of AR. When a poet writes, “Grief is a house with no windows,” they aren’t just telling us something—they’re showing us another layer of reality, a symbolic map projected onto the raw feeling of loss. That’s augmented perception. That’s immersive cognition. Poetry demands that the reader engage their imagination and emotional intuition to “see” what isn’t there literally—but is completely real.
Poetry also plays with sound—whether spoken, whispered, or sung. The rhythm of a line, the repetition of a word, the silence of a pause—these sonic elements shape how we experience meaning. Read aloud, a poem fills space like a spell. It alters the air, the mood, the moment. It turns a breath into prophecy.
Even visually, the shape of a poem on the page—the line breaks, the white space—is a form of spatial augmentation. It tells us how to move through the text, how to feel its weight or its lightness. A sonnet tightens reality into a precise architecture; a free verse poem spills it open.
Poetry is augmented reality because it reprograms language to reveal new dimensions of thought, memory, and emotion. It shifts how we understand not just words—but the world.
Updating ad campaigns - key takeaways
Traditional campaigns often “speak at” audiences rather than invite them into dialogue or action. Gen Z expects to participate, remix, and respond.
Outdated ads often rely on posters and flyers with fixed information. Younger generations are drawn to dynamic, multi-sensory experiences that feel alive and responsive.
Older campaigns often center the institution, art form, or prestige. Digital-native audiences are more driven by identity, shared values, and emotional resonance.
“People know when they are being condescended to; few choose to volunteer for the experience. Taste is taste, not objective reality or ultimate virtue. " Personal taste is an artifact of social grouping as much as are individual choices: " mostly, people like what their friends like, or what is liked by those they admire or desire, or what places them in the same category as those whose status they covet. Yet the world that calls itself “the arts” has generated endless justifications for the moral and aesthetic superiority of certain preferences. The resulting invidious snobbery attaching to “the arts” goes a long way to explain why people " don’t come out in droves to lobby for arts funding.’” - Arlene Goldbard, author of The Culture of Possibility, in an interview referencing the 2008 American for the Arts campaign below.
By shifting from institutional authority to cultural fluency, arts service organizations can meet new audiences where they are—and bring them where the arts can take them.
