Ethan Tobman Designs a Korean-inspired Winter Solstice at the Genesis House
Taylor Swift Eras Tour Creative Director Builds Enchanting Immersive Light Installation
This year, Ethan Tobman’s work is at the epicenter of contemporary culture. As the creative director for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, his illuminated stages and dreamy worlds have been viewed by millions in person in stadiums around the work and more on the Disney+ special. The lush and varied sets that Tobman created are eponymous with Swift’s musical vision and narrative concepts for her devoted fan base.
Tobman’s body of work encompasses film, music video, tech products, and the 3-star Michelin restaurant Crenn. His music video credits include Beyonce’s “Black is King” and “Lemonade,” visual albums, Swift’s “Fortnight, and Oscar-winning films “The Room” and “Beautiful Boy.” His short film, “Remote” was selected for the 2001 Cannes International Film festival.
Tobman’s newest creative work is on view at the Genesis House in New York City. The high-end Korean car brand tapped Tobman to make “STARSCAPE,” an immersive installation that blends the New York City and Seoul night skies. To conceptualize this work, he became a self-described student of Korean design. The experience feels transformative and uses 590 lights to create an interpretation of the Korean Winter Solstice, Dongji. Viewers enter a walkway on a darkened stage to be engulfed in a cacophony of lights that overtake the space, as portraits gradually emerge in the foreground using elements that harken back to Korean design principles.
“I’m happy to collaborate with someone like Ethan with his essence and emotions who can capture what we want to express from the culture,” said Claudia Marquez, the Chief Operating Officer of Genesis. Marquez met Tobman in Seoul this fall as he was researching and developing the installation. “He is a constantly creative mind. Earlier today he was telling me about the sound of the lights and the history. You can see how he’s feeling, positive feelings that we all need.”
We spoke to Tobman about his creative process at the exhibit’s debut.
Let’s start with your background in storytelling.
I started as a traditional filmmaker. I went to NYU Film school. I made a short film that went to the Cannes Film Festival, and I thought I would employ traditional narrative filmmaking techniques as my primary medium to tell stories and create empathy and make people feel joy, which is ultimately been my goal. Anything that I've done is not just to make people feel joy, but to make adults feel like children again in some way. As I worked in independent film in New York, which was a very low budget market that reached a very small audience, I fell into fashion photography and editorial for people like Annie Liebowitz and Mario Testino and Craig McDean and Nick Knight, and really fell into that medium at the height of publishing. “The September Issue” was made like the year I got into that scene. I learned how to create still photos with some of the best photographers in the world, but from a perspective of elevated cinema, which then led to the photographers working in music videos and commercials, to then really delving into short form, specifically working very closely with people like Beyoncé for many, many years and then Ariana Grande to help craft iconography and short form image making that supported their music, which then finally led to some of those directors moving back into feature films and essentially arriving where I started.
In the course of making a movie like “The Menu” where we employed a three-star Michelin chef named Dominique Crenn to advise us on the food, she then asked me to redesign her restaurant, which was always a dream. That was really art imitates life where I’m designing a fictional restaurant for a movie and then an actual restaurant in real life based on the movie. I find everything regarding storytelling and creating a scene of empathy for people in immersive environments fascinating. All I'm really looking to do is not repeat myself.
Are you dipping your toe into contemporary art spaces or museums?
I've always gravitated towards art created for the masses in darkness. I've always been really drawn to the idea that strangers laugh, scream, and cry together in real time in a way they would never choose to in the privacy of their own lives. Friends have adjacent to my exploration and storytelling, made names for themselves in the art world or in product design or in hospitality, all of these things that are sort of empathetic and narrative adjacent to traditional cinema. Music videos are now for me live performance or immersive design. It wasn't necessarily the goal, but I find that as I'm sharpening my tool set and exploring ways of making people feel things through a combination of sound, story, and visual tools, there are lots of things I haven't considered that are interesting to me. As long as I can make people feel bonded or in some way feel like they've escaped their day to day, there are many mediums that feel appropriate to do it.
Tell me about this work. How did you how did you land on it and how did you craft the narrative of the city?
Genesis House reached out to create an immersive light experience, and I was intrigued specifically by light's distinct features within Korean heritage, because I knew so little about it. I'd always wanted to go to Seoul. I've always heard that this particular country and that particular city are at the vanguard of all things design and ephemeral at this moment. I leapt as it as much because I was a student that wanted to learn as a storyteller that wanted to move people. I started as a student and I'm deeply invested in continuing my education in all things Korean. We have ideas or preconceived notions of what that means, and certainly mine were not informed by the experiences I've had in the last couple of months. You might have an idea of what it means to have an emphasis on things like minimalism or harmony with nature or non-dualism or simplicity or elegance, but a different culture’s activation of those words is very different from mine. I'm like a neophyte who's intrigued by the concept. But on the other hand, what I do feel really confident in and feel really joyful to do is to use my visual storytelling techniques to make people feel a universal sense of joy and unity. Using what I know with what I was learning and absolutely did not know was ultimately what made this such a rich experience amazing.
It’s a far more intimate experience than some of your work. You did beautiful work in the Eras Tour where thousands of people experience it in person, and in a cinematic narrative way in the film made from the tour.
I think it's a misnomer to think of something as the Eras Tour or a stadium tour as something that isn’t intimate. I think the idea of anything that I do is to make everyone feel like they're in the first row and make everyone wonder what the last row is looking at simultaneously. Everything that I've ever done, if it's $150 million movie or a $5 million movie, is to make people feel moved in some way because they feel deeply close to the narrative core of the story and that intimacy is not delegated by scale or budget.
There’s a community experience when you're with that many people in a room, that is a shared experience.
I remember when I was 16 years old, and I went to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show “and there were 100 people in the room, it felt as unified and culturally urgent in the way that maybe the Eras Tour is now. But like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” will play and into infinity at midnight screenings around the world. I think if you can tap into that certain thing that makes people feel connected and makes them feel moved, that's where intimacy comes from and its forever.
“I’ve always been really drawn to the idea that strangers laugh, scream, and cry together in real time in a way they would never choose to in the privacy of their own lives. ”
Intimacy as a collective. What are you working on now?
I'm spreading my wings. I'm exploring directing projects in the feature film market. I'm looking into immersive entertainment, because I think it's a fantastic way right now to bring people together and make them feel things that more passive experiences like watching TV at home may not. I've always been obsessed with where visuals and music combine, so I'm working with a few musicians right now on visual interpretations and experiences of their music. It allows me to flex. I'm equally interested in immersive product that the tech industry is using to create immersive entertainment in ways we haven't experienced.
I want to know about the relationship between visualization and sounds?
I've never seen how they can’t coexist. I wasn't raised in the silent sound medium. I've always had a real magnetic draw to visualizing music, visualizing the iconographic approach to a solo artist or a band, or adding music to a narrative to help add that layer that makes something visceral. Something like “STARSCAPE” was fascinating to me because we created the sound of light. We used something called the Schumann resonance, which interprets the heartbeat of the earth through wavelengths in the Earth's atmosphere to something called sonification, which takes the data inputs of in this case, light and attributes specific timbers, pitches, volumes, and tempos to them to accurately interpret what sound might sound like to the human ear. As a result, when you start with science and you start with data and you start with something real, you can create fantasy.
How do you know when it's finished?
You know, when they tell me it's time to deliver my opening remarks and open the doors, I'll work until the last possible second. But I feel deeply satisfied when people experience at whatever point in the process that is. But it's never finished. It continues. It moves on. It flows. And then there’s the next story.
“STARSCAPE” is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 11am-7pm, until January 12. Genesis House Restaurant guests have access to extended hours following their dining experience.
Also appears in Whitewall.