Piotr Fortuna
Boundaries of Simulation. Staged Lives of Virtual Influencers
In the course of the meeting, I will be exploring the topic of “virtual influencers” – computer-generated characters with full-fledged social media profiles, emulating behaviours of real-life influencers: they publish photographs and video footage, interact with other users, promote and sell goods, are featured on magazine covers and billboards, record songs, and give interviews. Virtual influencers trigger assorted responses: fear of humans being supplanted from the labour market, uncanny valley phenomena, and reflexes of awe, jealousy and empathy.
During the workshop, I intend to consider ways of presenting virtual influencers and their associations with related (or somehow similar) constructs, such as avatars, data doubles, virtual assistants or humanoid robots. While similar in anthropomorphism, all these constructs differ in terms of function, agency mechanisms, and levels of realness or disembodiment.
We will also talk about properties constituting and/or undermining the credibility of virtual influencers; ways in which these characters are incorporated into contemporary “economy of attention” mechanisms, and how they establish relations with female digital platform users; how they address matters of corporeality, sexuality and race, provoking and exacerbating identity policy-related debates, and testing the boundaries of the allowable (and the efficient, in terms of communication). Last but not least, we will ponder the question of what the virtual influencer phenomenon can tell us about ourselves and the moment we have found ourselves at – human anxieties and fantasies in times of technological rush.
