loading . . . When the Dead Perform: Simulacra, Spectacle, and the Ethics of Faking the Live Performance > “Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existant. And this is precisely what the present system’s mythology continually needs to exploit. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more.” – John Berger, Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible, 2001
**T** he announcement of the “Ecos” tour built around Soda Stereo, featuring a holographic rendering (“a virtual, high tech representation”) of Gustavo Cerati (1959–2014) performing alongside original members Charly Alberti (drums) and Zeta Bosio (bass), who are still alive and perform live alongside the hologram, has marked a striking moment in the evolving relationship between technology, memory, and cultural consumption in Latin America.
Opening on 21 March 2026 at the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires and scheduled to run through to September 2026, concluding in Madrid, the event is presented as a concert experience while drawing on archival recordings and visual reconstruction, described by spectators as “a hologram” or “a digital avatar”, to simulate the presence of a performer who is no longer alive. The result, for me, is disquieting: an attempt to collapse the distance between absence and presence, death and performance, what is recorded and what is performed live.
Needless to say, Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum, first published in 1981, is an obvious point of departure for engaging with this phenomenon, describing a condition in which representations no longer refer to any underlying reality and instead generate their own self contained logic. In the case of the “Ecos” tour, the situation appears to extend beyond this. There is an effort to reinstall the original within the copy and to render the distinction irrelevant to the spectator. Who cares if Cerati is not really there, performing live? Who cares if he is actually dead?
An obvious precedent is the ABBA Voyage project, which opened to the public on 27 May 2022 at the purpose built ABBA Arena in London and has since been extended repeatedly, with performances scheduled to continue until at least November 2026. The production employs advanced visual technologies to stage performances by digital avatars of the band’s members. The difference between _Voyage_ and _Ecos_ remains significant: all four members of ABBA are still alive. The sense of unease in ABBA Voyage emerges from temporal dissonance, as audiences encounter youthful versions of artists whose ageing is widely known. The illusion engages memory and nostalgia while leaving intact the boundary between life and death. In the Soda Stereo case, that boundary is precisely what is unsettled. Cerati is presented in a form that suggests renewed performance despite his death. The simulation moves beyond evoking an image and attempts to construct a form of presence.
This shift resonates with John Berger’s observation in _Steps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible_ , first published in 2001, that “technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existent.” Berger described a world in which images proliferate independently of the bodies and realities they once indexed, producing a spectacle of disembodied appearances driven by consumption, even though he did not live to experience the excesses of algorithms and generative artificial intelligence that define the present moment. A quarter of a century later, there is a discernible transformation of this condition. In holographic performances such as “Ecos”, the apparent and the existent are drawn together through a deliberate act of recombination. The illusion is staged as a form of existence and presence.
The audience is invited to, importantly, pay to experience a concert that cannot take place in any conventional sense. The technological apparatus performs a conceptual inversion in which absence is overwritten. What appears is treated, for the duration of the event, as what is. The ontological gap identified by Berger remains, yet it becomes functionally irrelevant within the spectacle. Audience engagement here is not about belief in authenticity. What is expected is a willingness to participate in consumption, in alignment with a status quo shaped by the fear of missing out and the expectation of immediate access to everything, whenever it is desired, at the click of a button.
For me, it has been shocking to observe the willingness of some fans and critics to embrace this show and to respond positively to it. Apparently, those who are critical of it are “missing the point”. I do think it raises pressing ethical questions. At what point does homage give way to appropriation? Who authorises the posthumous performance of an artist, and under what conditions? Does legal ownership of image and recordings fully address the transformation of those materials into a simulated performing presence?
In Ecos, a shift occurs from reproduction towards animation, where a performing subject is constructed in the absence of a living individual. This points towards a paradigmatic shift: if a dead performer can be made to perform again and again, post mortem, what of the rights of living performers, and of the values traditionally granted to live music? One is also reminded of Carrie Fisher in _The Rise of Skywalker_ (2019), where she appeared through unused footage and CGI. It However, there are still considerable, and nuanced, distictions to be made between such a use of CGI in a film (where the spectator does not always-already assume the actors on the screen are alive and where there is no live interaction between the audience and the living actors) and the use of the sound and image digital trickery as employed in Ecos, where the audience interacts with the performance (and therefore unavoidably must think of it) as a _live_ event.
Carrie Fisher CGI. Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney.
And here is the rub: it is all about commercial logic and the search for endless profit. Berger’s argument that image proliferation is driven by an appetite reminds us of this. Death itself appears as a limit to be overcome through technological means. Once audiences accept holographic, videographic, or deep fake performance as equivalent to live presence, the economic possibilities expand considerably. The only norm becomes continuous exploitation.
The implications extend beyond aesthetics into questions of existence. Berger warned that the separation of appearance from existence erodes what he called “Necessity”, the condition that grounds human experience in finitude, vulnerability, and embodiment. Without this grounding, experience becomes harder to share and is replaced by a spectacle that fosters isolation. Holographic and deep fake concerts intensify this condition by presenting presence without the constraints of living bodies. The experience offered is stripped of contingency, risk, and mutual encounter.
What is diminished in such performances is a sense of relation, of communion. A live concert involves more than the execution of sound and image. It is shaped by the co presence of performers and audience, by unpredictability, and by the shared awareness of time passing irreversibly. The awareness of the performer’s living physical presence, in relation to our own, has long defined much of the essence of live music. When we sing along, it is our own voices that create communication and communion. There was always an awareness that a given moment, despite repetition throughout a tour, was absolutely unique. A pre recorded and technologically mediated simulation, appreciated in much the same way as a fully live concert, replaces this with replication. It becomes a spectacle in which participants risk deceiving others and themselves. Singing along to a projection of a dead performer is not only unsettling; it can feel empty and even embarrassing.
If the “Ecos” tour proves sustainable and achieves commercial success, it is likely to establish a precedent. Rights holders may increasingly turn to holographic or deep fake performances as reliable and repeatable sources of revenue. Ethical hesitation may diminish as such practices become normalised. What begins as an exceptional spectacle may become routine. This is all, perhaps, obvious.
The central question concerns the implications of resurrecting the dead for entertainment, and in particular for entertainment described as “live”. The issue extends beyond the legacy of individual artists and touches on broader cultural understandings of presence, memory, and mortality. The holographic Cerati does not restore the artist. Even if Soda Stereo was never only Cerati, and the remaining members perform alongside the digital reconstruction, _Ecos_ produces a version that can be consumed without the resistance of reality. The apparent stands in for the existent through a process that persuades audiences to overlook the gap between them.
These views may well be dismissed as those of an older voice resisting change, yet I hope they remain worth articulating. The extent to which this substitution is accepted may shape, at the very least, the future of live performance and influence how distinctions between lived experience and technologically mediated display continue to be understood.
**REFERENCES**
Baudrillard, J. 1994 [1981]. _Simulacra and Simulation_. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Berger, J. 2025 [2001]. “Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible”, in _Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance_ , London: Verso.
Romero Nuñez, F. (2026). “Critics say the ‘Ecos’ tour is not Soda Stereo. They’re missing the point”. Buenos Aires _Herald_. 15 April 2026. Available at https://buenosairesherald.com/op-ed/critics-say-ecos-tour-is-not-soda-stereo-theyre-missing-the-point. [Accessed 17 April 2026].
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### _Related_ https://ernestopriego.com/2026/04/17/when-the-dead-perform-simulacra-spectacle-and-the-ethics-of-faking-the-live-performance/
