Bob Bonniol, chief innovation officer at ACT Entertainment presents the keynote address at XLIVE: The Concert Touring Sessions on Saturday, December 5 at LDI 2026 in Las Vegas.
You Had to Be There: Live entertainment when everything else can be rendered
Production meeting. Somebody slides the deck across the table and says, "Make this." Renderings straight out of Midjourney. I swear I've seen this moodboard before... It's gorgeous... and it's the same gorgeous as everybody else's.
Then we walk into a stadium. Sixty thousand strangers hit the same word of the same song at the same instant, and the hair on my arms stands up. Nobody rendered that. More people than ever are paying for it.
That's the new picture, and it changes the job. Every big show is a broadcast now: fifty thousand camera operators and no director. Pop has turned into theater. Touring has turned inside out. The small rooms where most of us learned this craft are closing. And everyone is fed the same references and the same tools, so everything looks great... and the same. "My friend Tobias Rylander calls it creative inflation," notes Bonniol.
The keynote kicks off XLIVE with stories that taught Bonniol what this work is for.. "from a tape machine that ate my reel at LDI in the nineties to a Providence club with twenty-four lights and a console full of beer," he recalls. "Somewhere between those two rooms is the one thing the machines can't make, and the reason it's suddenly worth more than anything we hang."
You can render the band. You can't render the room.
Check out the full schedule for XLIVE:The Concert Touring Sessions - including Dining With Dinosaurs, the evening networking dinner with industry pioneers.