BY PROFESSOR ANDY MIAH, CHAIR OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS AND FUTURE MEDIA AT UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD.
This week, I head to Paris for the Olympic Games, continuing a 25 year research journey into examining creative innovation at the world’s biggest event.
This trip really resonates, after a year of developing the MediaCity Immersive Technologies Innovation Hub in Salford, which has been bringing diverse creative worlds together, focused on innovation within the creative media industries.
In today’s mega event milieu these endeavours matter, as organisers try to figure out how to secure their future audiences. Television audiences aren’t what they used to be and the expansion of countless new stages in the form of digital channels are nudging organisers to expand their minds in defining their experience.
We saw such experiments grow during Covid with such pioneering events as the RSC collaboration with Manchester International Festival, Marshmallow Laser Feast, and Philharmonia Orchestra’s on ‘Dream’, an immersive version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
At previous Olympics we’ve also seen pioneering efforts, such as the creation of an aerial drone display within the PyeongChang 2018 Opening Ceremony, remarkable not least because it was repeated in the Olympic park each night – weather permitting – thus democratising an otherwise highly exclusive experience.
In Paris, while everyone is looking forward to seeing how the athletes perform in their sports, the creative production teams that surround these competitions are also breaking new records and this has been a compelling feature of the modern Games, but they are the lesser known stories of the Games.
As a starting point in Paris, the Opening Ceremony is being staged as an epic open air extravaganza, with displays taking place across 6km of the River Seine. Culminating in a finale at the Trocadero, in the shadows of the Eiffel Tower, it is unprecedented in scale and the most complex opening ceremony in Olympic history. It is also a production which will give rise to novel broadcasting formats, with IMAX in the USA staging ticketed experiences across the country.
Such innovation reveals how the Olympic Games sees itself as an event with creativity and media innovation at its heart. Some of the world’s most gifted artists have been making work for the Olympic Games for nearly a century, from Leni Riefenstal in the controversial Berlin 1936 Games to Danny Boyle in London 2012.
The Games are also deeply intertwined with the host nation’s creative and cultural history. Who can forget the performance of the Spice Girls at the Closing Ceremony of London 2012 or the appearance of Mr Bean, James Bond and the Queen? The Mr Bean moment remains the most watched Olympic clip on the International Olympic Committee’s YouTube channel, with over 121 million views.
Each Olympic Games is also accompanied by some kind of Olympic cultural programme, which often elevates the work of national artists across a wide variety of disciplines from painting to poetry. Indeed, this speaks to the ancient origins of the Olympic Games, where medals were awarded for artistic expressions, a competition which also featured in the first half of the modern Olympic Games.
With each Games, new broadcast experiences are pioneered often through the principal broadcasting actor, the Olympic Broadcasting Service, which is the organisation that films all of the sports content for broadcasters to distribute. This year, OBS is using artificial intelligence to create the most immersive Olympic Games experience ever.
So, while sports and creative communities can often seem worlds apart, their common ground is often found in the theatricality of the performance of sport and the Games is often a moment of bringing them together. A key catalyst is the mobilisation of talent through the common purpose of presenting place. The Olympic Games is an event very much about the importance of place and place making. Some of the world’s most successful city stories have been those who used the Games to reimagine themselves, perhaps the most remarkable of which was Barcelona in 1992.
We will see during Paris as well, as it hands over to the Los Angeles 2028 team and Snoop Dog is one of the first actors in that show, selected as one of the final torch bearers for the Paris 2028 Olympic Games.
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Professor Andy Miah is part of the InnovateUK-funded MediaCity Immersive Technologies Innovation Hub and the Chair of Science Communication & Future Media at the University of Salford. During the Olympic Games, his research activity is being shared through Games Time News. You can follow the MediaCity Immersive Technologies Innovation Hub on LinkedIn here.