Designboom_ Following his tribute to the iconic Elvis Presley in September 2023, London-based film director and video artist Marco Brambilla is gracing the Sphere in Las Vegas with another monumentally captivating digital artwork, dubbed Heaven’s Gate. The large-scale video collage will light up the spherical display on December 1st, 2023, and run until February 18th, 2024, stunning future concert-goers once again. Brambilla initially showcased Heaven’s Gate at the Perez Museum in Miami, which has loaned the artwork for this special 360-degree presentation on the exterior LED surface of Las Vegas’ next-gen entertainment medium.

Heaven’s Gate is one of the latest video collages in Marco Brambilla’s Megaplex series, which includes Civilization (2008), Evolution (2010), Creation (2012), and the most recent piece displayed at the Sphere, King Size (2023). A lavish and satirical take on the silver screen spectacle of Hollywood dreams and excesses, the London-based artist‘s most recent video artwork both celebrates collective storytelling consciousness and satirizes its saturated glamour. The continuously looping video work ascends through the seven levels of Purgatory, each stage its very own landscape of looping samples lifted from iconic moments of cinematic history.

In an essay titled Marco Brambilla’s Labyrinth of Labyrinths, Swedish art curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum reflects on the artist’s mind-bending approach to leveraging digital imaging technologies in an attempt to critique popular culture and society: ‘In the work, Brambilla makes visible the concomitant tensions present in religion, industry and celebrity, ascension and fall, innocence and experience, vanity and pageantry, sexuality and awakening, simplicity and excess. Speaking the language of Hollywood’s dream factory, it communicates a nostalgia that feels at once familiar and uncanny and seemingly appropriate to the mood of 2020, where media saturation created a convergence of fact and fiction in a voracious cycle of introspection and collective anxiety.’ The Heaven’s Gate artwork unfolds similarly into a dreamy, chaotic spectacle in the virtual realm, creating an intricate maze of mazes, a winding visual puzzle that seems to embrace both the past and the future, somehow entwined with celestial bodies.