Living Venues: How AI and Interactivity Are Transforming Spaces into Communal Acts of Creation
by Olivia Reid, Music Artist & Lead Strategist @ Journey
Imagine a stadium that breathes. As the Coldplay concert sweeps into the chorus of “Yellow,” it almost feels like the audience is breathing life into the venue. This energy isn’t just from the music – but from thousands of golden wristbands – lit up and swaying together like a single field of wheat blowing in the wind. This is a simple, but effective example of venues and artists adding novelty to their live performance, by activating the audience as part of the show.
But what if we could take this several layers deeper, with the use of modern and generative AI? What if the venue itself could shift instantaneously with the artist, the season — and most importantly – audience? Journey has been instrumental in developing some of the world's most cutting-edge venues, including MSG's Sphere in Las Vegas, Category 10 in Nashville, and Lightroom in London– and we've witnessed a new trend of venues striving to redefine the norm with interactivity. As small clubs close and stadium tours dominate, AI is enabling a new kind of space: the Living Venue.
What Is a Living Venue?
A Living Venue is a space where lighting, sound, visuals, and stage design adapt instantly via intelligent processing of audience and performance data. The building itself is not a sentient storyteller – it “lives” by reacting to the energetic fingerprint of the live show, serving as a mirror to the artists and audiences engaging with it. Human emotion and spontaneity, amplified by AI, transforms otherwise static spaces into dynamic, collaborative canvases where no two performances feel the same.
Which Trends Tell Us Venues Are Headed Towards a Living Future?
Many spaces already integrate response mechanisms to reflect a deeper story about the people in them. Immersive and interactive experience companies like Meow Wolf and installations such as House of Eternal Return, have built their business from living media content that responds to visitors. At the same time the rise of multipurpose economics means that stadiums need to transform for different purposes – as Tottenham Stadium flips from field sport to concert to F1 karting track, or Sphere’s immersive 4D movie theatre morphs into an otherworldly trip for a Grateful Dead performance. These trends reveal the modern venue’s need for economic and creative flexibility.
At the same time, artists are craving new storytelling structures. Beyond the wristband stunts of Coldplay, fans go crazy for crowd loudness meters, fan-cams, and reactive lights – any way they can see themselves as a part of the show. Boundary pushing English trip-hop collective Massive Attack even made headlines for utilizing real-time facial recognition to highlight faces (and names) of those in the crowd. As one fan put it – this stunt blurred the line between art and surveillance, and the “fans became the show.”
The use of data and responsive algorithms to reflect an audience in an artwork has been utilized for decades, the difference today is that we can process data differently via AI to not only dictate but generate. Lisa Barrette of Journey says, “If a data-driven piece is done well, it reveals more layers to the story as people interact with it more…”.
And no one likes peeling back layers more than super fans.
Step into the Shoes of a Super Fan in a Living Venue
Whether unpacking Kendrick Lamar’s historical references in his Superbowl performance, seeking out Taylor Swift’s next album’s Easter eggs, or designing personalized couture for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour, super fans seek ways to dive deeper into the artist’s world. Superfans don’t just consume content… they hunt it, decode it, and stitch themselves into the story. Living Venues give them the canvas for that hunt.
Artists – like Katy Perry on her Lifetimes Tour – have faced backlash in recent months over the accusation that their show content included AI-generated visuals. Though Perry’s team hasn’t confirmed nor denied the claim – and the tour’s sci-fi gaming theme might imply intentional AI use – disappointed fans felt cheated by the fact that such an established artist would utilize AI-made visuals. The real issue in this case was that the content was pre-baked.
Cautionary tales of AI use come from tech that is imposed, inauthentic, or one-sided. But if fans could see themselves – and other humans – as a co-creator of that content, suddenly the content is not AI-generated, it’s AI-transformed.
When AI is used to push content at fans, it feels fake. When it’s used to pull fans into the content, it feels alive.
Designing for Content That’s Alive
In 2024, the Journey team partnered with architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) using this very approach, in order to generate visuals for a Cowboy vs. Aliens themed summer event. These light-hearted, rapidly produced AI visuals featured motion imagery of attendees, depicting them as cowboys and aliens, within a loose storyline. Simple in its strategy and execution, the ability for attendees to see themselves and their colleagues in the artwork itself left a lasting impression.
Now imagine if, instead of rolling out pre-made AI visuals, Katy Perry’s design team took a similar approach by creating an AI generator which could embed the crowd within tour-themed content. Imagine lights that mirror the audience’s outfits, a stage that shifts on wheels guided by fan votes, and opted-in photos from social media woven into AI-generated sci-fi visuals – placing fans on the big screen, inside the world of the tour, with their images dancing alongside Perry.
In this way AI isn’t replacing artistry, its amplifying connection.
According to a recent 2025 poll from Harvard Youth, fewer than half of Americans under 30 feel a sense of community, with only 17% reporting deep social connection. Rather than enlisting AI chats to fill the connection void, Living Venues can use AI to fuel community-shaped art and real-time collaboration — a venue in conversation with the crowd — resulting in a shared human experience no single artist or designer could predict.
How to Design Today, to Build AI-Powered Spaces Tomorrow
The rise of Living Venues means the playbook for designing “plug-and-play” venues has changed. We need to design creative goalposts which enable artists to bring-their-own-universe, while developing the generative and algorithmic AI infrastructure that enables fans to step inside it.
But what is required to build a universe with AI? Power. As live AI visuals and dynamic content scale up, leaning on off-site cloud processing is power-hungry, water-intensive, and risky. In order to be sustainable and make the best investment choice, venues will need to be designed, built, and maintained intentionally with on-site edge computing hardware and micro data centers, for a faster, greener, and more resilient infrastructure that can support real-time crowd analytics and evolving requirements of AI generation at scale.
A Living Venue can not be built as a blank black box, but instead as an instrument that is carefully carved– requiring outside-the-box craftsmanship before it can be played to its fullest by both performers and audiences.
The Lasting Vision
In the end, Living Venues live because people do. They evolve with the season, the crowd, and the moment. The call now is not to ignore AI or its impact on live business models, but to design intentionally for its use as a creative enabler of human dynamics. The future belongs to those venues – ones that transform with AI, are built to sustain it, and are designed for communal co-creation.
Olivia Reid, Journey
