HBO HOSTS “LOVECRAFT COUNTRY” VIRTUAL REALITY CONCERT

HBO announced its decision to close out its “Lovecraft Country: Sanctum” Virtual Reality experience with a concert named “Music of the Cosmos,” as a celebration for the season finale of the series “Lovecraft Country.” The “Lovecraft Country” season finale airs this Sunday at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO, and its complete first season and will soon be available to stream on HBO Max. “This is the perfect platform to explore the impact of music and movement in a new dimension designed to celebrate Black art, stories, and voices,” said Janelle Monáe, who will perform for the first time in virtual reality. 

The VR social experience will feature 100 select influential singers including the eight-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, film and TV actress, and record producer, Monáe. “As long-standing fans, we couldn’t be more thrilled to be partnering with Janelle Monáe on this uniquely immersive virtual reality concert experience,” said Dana Flax, VP of Program Marketing at HBO. “Through her art and her activism, Janelle embodies the spirit of innovation, justice, and Black joy that makes her the perfect artist to help us send off Lovecraft Country’s first season.”

"Lovecraft Country: Sanctum" was developed as a Social VR space to measure the possibility of how future games, theaters, game installations, live evnts, and the like will look. Previous Lovecraft Sanctum events featured an Afrofuturist art show by David Alabo, Devan Shimoyama and Adeyemi Adegbesan, a theatrical performance inspired by the words of James Baldwin, made in collaboration with Black artists. The show was adapted by "Lovecraft Country" writer Shannon Houston, and performed by star Jurnee Smollett. Voiceover performances were executed by the series’ Jonathan Majors, Courtney B. Vance, and Michael Kenneth Williams. Sanctum was create damid a partnership with HBO and The Mill in the form of a team of artists, coders, and strategists. The first episode of the show reached more than 9 million viewers across all platforms, and has maintained its spot as top series on HBO Max since its debut in August.

Ahead of Monáe’s set, guests will be invited into The Reliquary, a mystery room hosted by “Lovecraft Country’s” Michael Kenneth Williams, filled with artifacts from throughout the show and virtual experience, each with an accompanying audio snippet narrated by Williams. The programming also includes a series of events such as an immersive theater, escape rooms, art installations, and puzzles via the Oculus Quest headset. “This is the perfect platform to explore the impact of music and movement in a new dimension designed to celebrate Black art, stories, and voices,” Monáe said.

According to Lovecraft Experience Director Aline Ridolfi, the final event was inspired by the 50’s Chicago block party featured in the first episode of “Lovecraft Country.” Each event has been simultaneously run on the social VR platform VRChat, which allows guests to talk and interact with each other in real-time within the environment, and streamed to the world via YouTube Live. Fans on the YouTube Live stream are also able to interact in real-time, solving riddles to trigger spells that directly impact the experience. “Using techniques like projection mapping and dynamic, interactive set design, the concert will see Janelle control the space with her performance,” Ridolfi said. “All aspects of the environment from the choreography and set design, to the lighting, will interact in a way that wouldn’t  be possible within a traditional concert set-up.”