When I asked Donald Glover (the artist currently known as Childish Gambino) what his new song “Algorythm” was about and why he wanted to create an augmented reality app around it, his reply was succinct: “Trust the Algorythm.”

So I did. I launched the app, held my iPhone in front of my face, and walked through a portal into Glover’s world. A cave scene began to form around me. I heard the first part of a long, extended mix of the (yet-to-be-released) Algorythm song, just beats and cave sounds (water dripping, rocks moving). I was instructed to search around the cave walls to find the “glyphs”—which when focused on, come to life and are beamed down to the cave floor. The people dance. The animals run around. Soon Childish’s own avatar shows up and gets its groove on.

After I found all the glyphs, the cave disintegrated around me and I found myself floating with the cave figures in outer space. Then the song gets going in earnest, and I heard Childish sing “Everybody–move your body . . .” A wide beam of light stretches between one planet and another. The designers throw in the “monolith” motif from Kubrick’s 2001, along with some visual nods to the movie’s “star gate” sequence.

I asked Glover why he chose those two settings—the cave and outer space—for the AR experience. “The journey from cave to space feels like the story of humanity,” he replied. Perfectly right.

From live show to AR

The visual themes, Glover explained, grew from a 2018 Childish Gambino show under a big dome at the artist’s PHAROS festival in Tapapakanga Regional Park in New Zealand. Immersive 3D imagery was projected on the top of the dome over the heads of the audience. “The app is an evolution of that idea,” Glover said.

Actually, the Pharos experience became a VR experience first, back in 2017. But Glover became interested in the possibilities of AR for conveying the creative world around the music. “Augmented reality removes the barrier between the physical and digital world,” Glover said.

The Pharos AR app actually doesn’t enable a lot of interaction between the digital content and the real world content. It does contain some interactive features—you can tap on the glyphs in the cave to activate them, for example. But the slow blending of the real world around you (as seen through the phone camera) into the world of the cave is compelling. It feels more like the gradual onset of a hallucinatory drug as opposed to the immediate occlusion and immersion you get when entering a VR experience.