Q’s With Jean-Michel Jarre: ‘This Pandemic Is An Opportunity To Change The Paradigm’ (Q1 Special)

Jean-Michel Jarre: I was shocked. I’ve performed in front of large audiences, but I never thought in my life that I could do better in the VR world than in the real world. We had no idea, the team and I. Around 150 people were working with me on this, and we really pushed the boundaries to try to do something different. We all had the ambition to create a kind of benchmark, not necessarily in terms of audience numbers, but in terms of approaching the world of VR. 

There’ve been lots of VR projects, everybody’s talking about virtual, but sometimes it’s just a pre-recorded performance placed in an existing space, like a video game, for instance. Most of the time, the performer is shot in front of the green screen and then injected into a VR situation, but that’s not live. What I also tried with this project was to approach all the lighting and the stage design like you would do for a real show, paying lots of attention and care to the mood, the shadows. All of these contrasts are actually very difficult to achieve in a VR environment.

In a sense it was funny, because it reminded me of when I started making music, and we were hijacking oscillators from public radio stations in France, devices not at all designed for musical purposes. It was similar with “Welcome to the Other Side,” we took software not necessarily made for doing what we were doing, and using it in a different way to get the right broadcast quality. My laptop actually doubled in size, swelling like a balloon from all the heat. 

The cathedral has been weakened like we have been in the days of pandemic. The idea of sending a message of hope for New Year’s Eve was something very special. That really gave me the desire and energy to create more projects in the VR world. Of course, we all hope to exit this dark tunnel we’re all trapped in at the moment, on both sides of the pond.  

However, I think that VR, XR, AR should seriously be considered as a mode of expression in themselves. 

It’s a bit like cinema at the end of the 19th century, when movies were shown in circuses and considered magic tricks. Lots of people from the theater world were saying, “they’re not actors, a real actor is somebody on stage in front of an audience.” I think VR/AR is in exactly the same situation. We should consider this art form not as a competitor for real festivals and real shows, but as something of its own, which is talking the language of our times in terms of technology. Our VR project attracted a younger audience, because we’re speaking their language.

Absolutely. In the case of “Welcome to the Other Side,” which was produced in collaboration with the city of Paris, it was always supposed to be a free concert for New Year’s Eve. I think it’s absolutely necessary to now look at ways in which we can monetize these kinds of productions. I think, frankly, that what we have offered to the audience for New Year’s Eve has an obvious value, and I’m absolutely convinced that people will be ready to pay for it just like they do when going to a festival, or to a movie theater.

We should take this whole pandemic moment as an opportunity to change the paradigm. If we want to respect artists, whether they are in music, movies or graphic art, we have to get used to saying, “Okay, if I’m following a concert, an opera, a movie or whatever live on the internet, it has value and I’m willing to pay for it.” In a strange way this whole dark period will probably make people understand and accept this. Think about it, during this time, we’ve been doing two things, mainly: we went out to get food, and we watched movies or listened to music or read books. We now have proof of how important culture, and music especially, is in our day-to-day life. 

Without music, without movies, without books, it would have been total despair. So, I’m quite optimistic about being able to monetize this, it’s already happening for some, but it’s not enough. 

We’re quite happy with the results, we had lots of visitors and people asking questions, because it was quite a premiere. To open a virtual gallery is fun, seeing the visitors browse the exhibition was interesting for different reasons. 

There are different reasons. Quite some time ago, I released an album called Music for Supermarkets, of which I only sold one single copy, like you would do with a painting. I needed to make a statement at the beginning of the CD era, that we should not forget about the importance and the value of the creative process. Our relationship with the value of copyrights for artists is still a very real question. You know how difficult it has been in the past few years for the music and cultural sector to deal with the digital world, financially and in terms of the economy. I think crypto art is an interesting attempt to find other ways of approaching the economy of any kind of creative process as soon as it’s in the digital world.  I’m talking about the notion of [an] original. 

What creates the value of a painting, the Mona Lisa for instance. If you have a decent reproduction at home, you can enjoy the same pleasure looking at it. Of course, the original has a totally different value, because it is the one made by the painter. Maybe we could approach music in the same way. It would help young creators to survive in difficult times, so I’m quite interested in exploring this new way of sharing works, whether from a music or a graphic point of view.

It’s quite ironic: These days, we’re all criticizing the big companies on the web, who are supposed to be responsible for everything. I think that’s not exactly the truth. This question has to be posed to ourselves: are we considering that a magazine you buy in a shop in the real world has the same value as the version on your screen? The content is the same, the talent of the journalists is the same. So why should it be 10 times less or free? It’s the same for movies, books and music, of course.

[Non-fungible Tokens] NFTs are a very interesting concept to reevaluate creative content. Art is the only sector of society where we can pay $10 at the beginning of the month and get access to basically anything. Imagine going to your local supermarket, paying $10 at the beginning of the month and buy anything you want. Blockchain delivery is quite interesting in that sense, and the reason I’m very interested in exploring this. Having said that, there is an issue with the ecological side of it, the fact that transactions in the crypto art world consume a lot of energy. That has to be solved, otherwise it’s going to be a major issue for this kind of system. A percentage of all sales from Cryptopia will go to an NGO called Carbon180 in attempt to rebalance what has been spent in terms of energy.

It’s going to be a traveling exhibition for the next five years with a fantastic Brazilian photographer called Sebastião Salgado. He is probably one of the best photographers in the world. This exhibition, Amazônia, is one of the most important in his life. He spent years in the [Brazilian Amazon] to capture the different aspects of Amazônia – not only what’s going on in terms of deforestation, but also the way people are living there. It’s a fantastic project. 

I was really honored when they asked me to create the soundtrack for the exhibition. I decided to do a binaural version of it, not just stereo, because it’s quite interesting to recreate the concept of the forest. Walking through the forest is quite noisy: birds singing, wind in the leaves, a plane flying above. It’s quite harmonious. I tried to use electronic, orchestral, ethnic and organic sounds from nature to recreate this immersive environment. I’m not a big fan of binaural, because most of the time it’s not very convincing. But in this case, I’m really happy with the result, because the composition, the music, has been conceived with lots of different sounds allowing this kind of spatialization and immersive experience.