__Julian Assange__has figured out a way to escape his asylum in London. Sort of.

Like Tupac Shakur, will.i.am, and Jem’s backing band before him, Assange, the embattled WikiLeaks founder, shed his house arrest and corporeal form today, and appeared as a hologram at The Nantucket Project.

Despite being holed up in a cozy state of asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for the past two years, Assange has managed to make his presence known at conferences around the globe. Thanks to programs like Skype, conference goers at SXSW, MIA concert attendees and reporters at press briefings have been able to interact with Assange thanks to internet connections and a video screen. The Nantucket Project is the first time that Assange has gone full hologram, though. This turn of events—made possible by Hologram USA—means that MIA’s dream of booking a holographic Assange as her opening act could soon be a reality.

The conference, a TED-type gathering of the intellectual elite of the Northeastern set, let Assange rub virtual elbows with the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, poet Billy Collins and journalist Eugene Jarecki, who interviewed Assange’s hologram.

Assange may have been happy to not have a physical body in the same room as Google chairman Eric Schmidt, though. They have been swapping barbs in the press lately as the two men drum up publicity for their books—Schmidt’s How Google Works and Assange’s, When Google Met WikiLeaks, which recounts a secret meeting between the two men in 2011. Last week Assange accused Google of being the “privatized NSA” and Schmidt responded by calling Assange “paranoid”.

According to Jarecki, Assange's speech was preceded by a recreation of the opening sequence of Star Wars.“In a wink at life imitating art,” Jarecki said in a column at The Guardian. “It’s the same old story of rebels against an empire, but in this case, Assange and kindred spirits such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Aaron Swartz see themselves as a real life band of rebels, loosely arrayed against an unholy global alliance of government and economic interests.”

It’s just too bad that Assange couldn’t figure out a way to project his hologram to Venice for the wedding of his lawyer Amal Alamuddinwho married some actor this weekend.