What everyone is ultimately looking for in an experience, says Justin Bolognino, is to achieve a flow state. He describes this as a state where one is able to transcend oneself and ‘allow the universe to move through’ oneself.
“The goal of meditation is a flow state, ultimately. So if you are a brand, that’s where your messaging is most engaging. If you are a live performer, that’s where you want people to be. Everyone is chasing the release that comes through a flow state. So a good experience will be shaped to get people there.” Achieving such a state does not mean an escape or loss of connection with the present reality.
The US-based musician-turned-‘synchronicity architect’ owns an agency named META, which creates multi-sensory experiences that ‘ignite the human spirit with story, technology and design’. META has a global network of ‘experience directors’ who inspire changes in human behaviour by combining ideas, artistry, music, interactive technology, trending fashion, virtual reality and offer ‘unforgettable spectacles’.
“It’s about building tools to understand and to build realities. But it’s fundamentally important to understand the nature of reality before you can start augmenting or virtualising it,” he explains, adding, “I am a musician who is obsessed with improvisation, and I have experienced these ‘real’ places by expressing my music. I had experienced transcendence where you are watching yourself play. You are no longer the one playing; you are just one unit and it’s such an extraordinary experience. I have also experienced this as a participant in a live music experience many times. It just becomes the thing you chase.”
In any good music experience, he observes, the audience is participating as deeply as the band that is making the music. It was a similar experience that Justin Bolognino encountered with an audio-visual DJ, who used turntables in what he called ‘an eclectic method’. “I realised that these artistes could not be categorised. They didn’t fit into the DJ world, they were not VJs. I realised that there is now a whole new class of talent that doesn’t fit into any categories. What they do is live, ephemeral, and immersive. They create experiences that you have to be there for. So we started representing them.”
That’s how he started META (‘meta’ here means ‘beyond’), and built a roster of these experience creators, who work with ‘real time technology’. The next step, he says, is to create sprawling experience worlds within which META would curate different artistes.
“There is something special about an ephemeral experience, almost like a mandala that is designed to be destroyed. It becomes a memory that you will have for the rest of your life. Millennials today want experiences, they don’t want things any more. The term ‘FOMO’ (fear of missing out) stems from this need to not miss out on ‘being there’.”
The whole concept of META also drew from his previous venture, ‘Learned Evolution’, a creative digital agency that specialised in multidisciplinary design, social media marketing, and tech-savvy experiences. Learned Evolution’s signature event remains #FEED powered by Twitter. #FEED, which was first launched in 2011, brought social media to life in real time.
“My biggest claim to fame with Learned Evolution was designing a marketing strategy for a venue in New York called ‘Brooklyn Bowl’, that would then go on to change the way that marketing is done for a live performance. It eventually led to #FEED, where we commissioned 16 experience directors to create 16 installations, sculptures and projections in different places, that pulled in content in real time to show what was happening all over the SXSW event, through one hashtag to pull up data.”
It was all about reminding people about the metaphysical, real-time, hidden connections between us, that people cannot see. Since then, he says it has become a frightening time for social media, because ‘they have too much power that is out of control’.
“My country is falling apart right now, because of the role social media played in amplifying falsehoods, in allowing scale, profitability and click rates to be more important than the truth. This is the hot topic at the moment, but technologies such as blockchain are going to play a huge role in authentication. If we can get to a space where our identities are fully authenticated, then we will be able to continue to socialise digitally, but from a place where we own our own data, we allow data to be given on our terms.”
If such a system is created, he says, then it is possible to make the best of both worlds. “The whole challenge is people’s need to make billions. Why can’t we have respectable businesses that only have to turn a profit in order for us to be content? The idea of success has been blown out of proportion to an extent that is unsustainable. The gap between wealth and poverty has become so wide. It has to do with technology for the sake of scale.”
META helps mitigate the situation by developing a platform that will allow people to have virtual identities as animated holograms tied to blockchains, generated based on who they are, rather than what they are. “Your identity then is no longer about kid photos, or how good-looking you are in a bikini. It’s now about who you are, what your values are, and what you have to bring to the table.”
