There are moments when you realize you are living in the future.

Watching a driverless car pull up to a stop sign, front seat empty, a handless steering wheel starting to turn. FaceTiming a family member on the other side of the world, remembering what it used to take to talk with them 15 years ago. Seeing a moment, taking a photo, editing it, contextualizing it and sharing it with a global network of people in an instant. It’s up to you whether these are utopian or dystopic, but they are times when a tomorrow that you once imagined is poking its head through into the now.

But there is absolutely nothing that made me feel that keen and conflicted tension of the future arriving around me than sitting with 3,000 other people to watch performing avatars of four Swedish pensioners.

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Earlier in the summer, when we were back in the old country visiting family, we took a trip to see ABBA Voyage in London. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was intrigued. There was talk of holograms. Astounding visuals. A performance that took a team of thousands and cost millions to make, but was also hard to describe. What was this mystery show?

It turned out to be one of the strangest experiences of my life.

Voyage is a 90-minute multimedia performance that takes place in a custom-built arena, mostly focused on digital avatars of Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny and Bjorn, projected on huge screens, singing their way through the band’s greatest hits. And for an hour and a half I veered through a frankly baffling range of emotions. I was amazed, terrified, confused, surprised, joyful, disgusted, bored, thrilled… and want to go back to see it again so I can understand what happened to me.

The basics we can put to one side. The show features most—but not all—of the big numbers, plus a few new ballads that felt like album fillers, ABBA-esque melodies that almost could have been written by AI. There are light shows, vintage footage, and animated interludes that give it all some texture, and—smartly—a live band who pop up to give the whole thing the zing of a flesh-and-blood concert. The audience, meanwhile, was a mixture of bopping boomers and glittery Mamma Mia-era zennials (they were also overwhelmingly white, which felt a little odd in such a multicultural city.)

As a whole, Voyage is exceedingly well crafted: an incredibly smart combination of scale and movement to combine the best elements of concert film, music video and live show.

I don’t think the band members are holograms, just extremely well-lit digital models on massive screens. But from a distance, when the avatars are human-scale and standing or dancing around the stage, they are indistinguishable from the real thing. In close-up, though, they are a little less convincing: movements that are almost the real thing; eyes that miss a little sparkle; textures that are not quite there.

It left me almost constantly disoriented. At times it was close enough to believe you were there, watching the band 40 years ago; at others it was like watching the most expensive video game cutscene in history. One moment I was inquisitive: was what I was seeing real? The next, I was uncomfortably far into the uncanny valley. 

The crowd was euphoric, for the most part. They had an emotional connection to the songs, and an awe of the band that transcended everything else (Agnetha drew wolf whistles at some point, a category of multifaceted ick I hadn’t experienced before.) Their enthusiasm added to my confusion. Was nobody seeing what I was seeing? Were they expecting these avatars to be alive?

Then I argued with myself. Don’t we have the same reaction at the cinema? When people go to movies and clap the action, they don’t expect a response from what’s on screen. Don’t we get invested in video games and their almost-real digital people? We have loved fiction for as long as we have been people. Don’t people gather by the thousands for virtual festivals in Fortnite and Roblox or to watch augmented reality perfomances by Billie Eilish? Am I not a hypocrite?

When I go to a concert I might hope to make eye contact with the performer, but I go to football matches and (as my friends and family can attest) shout vigorously at the players, even though they’ll never hear me. And I’m looking forward to seeing the re-release of the Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense—a performance of roughly the same vintage as Voyage.

Those conflicting signals and counterarguments are all true, I suppose, but it was the combination of formats and the effort that generated the emotional response that took Voyage to a new place for me. It challenged me. It walked a line between the real and the unreal, between history and simulation. What did I experience? Who did I experience? Did ABBA even really exist? And if they didn’t, would it matter?

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At the end, the audience—whooping, ecstatic—filed out of the arena and headed towards the train station. It was the height of summer, late in the evening. The future had just reached through into my present, and the sky above the city was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.