People who do not exist: how digital models change our lives

People who were created using computer technology are sometimes difficult to distinguish from real ones. They actively maintain their profile on Instagram, in which they share photos and talk about their lives with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. How do digital models live, the portal said KYKY.

Photo: Shutterstock

Virtuals, or characters created on a computer (cgi), have become the representatives of the brightest trends in digital and fashion industries. Some characters promote liberal values, others advertise new collections of fashion brands, and others tell very intimate stories. We present to your attention the most famous American virtuals and their creators.

American girl: sings, goes to shows and falls in love with guys

Michaela Souz is 19 years old - she will always be so much. She lives in Los Angeles, feeds 1,7 million Instagram followers with regular posts, and loves to eat tacos. Michaela is not just a model and singer who publishes photos from a beauty salon, memes from Twitter and music from Spotify. She adheres to liberal views: she advocates the rights of transgender people (she even wrote a letter to Congress in support of the community of these people), supports the black lives matters movement and legal abortions, calls for voting in the presidential election, which she herself would have done if it hadn’t for one thing - Mikaela does not exist in the real world. She is a virtual influencer.

In 2016, Lil Michaela began her blogging career. And then she released the first track Not Mine, which almost immediately hit the Spotify chart. “Music is my passion,” she told Vogue in an interview. - In it, I try to stay true to my experience. But I definitely felt the pressure coming from my fans to release something. ” On the day of the release, she asked the subscribers "not to stop sending her screenshots of playlists with her song."

Since then, she has released four more singles: Over You, You Should Be Alone, On My Own and Money. And two clips that, in total, have been watched more than three million times. “My big goal is to start performing live. I can’t wait to go on stage and perform new songs, ”she told V Magazine.

Like an ordinary influencer, Michaela shows subscribers her whole life. So she gathered in IKEA for furniture in a new apartment, and now she is doing laundry, in the morning she met with a colleague in the workshop with whom she "talked about the music industry, feminism and love for Janet Jackson." The next day, she asks followers to give advice, “what to do when you like a guy, but you don’t know if it’s mutual,” later she collects money for a shelter in which homeless young people can come.

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In each post, Michaela notes brands (Diesel, Vetements, Prada and smaller). Once Prada even invited her to his show in Milan. Journalists from Dazed magazine told how it was: she published a series of 3D-generated GIFs with the new Prada collection, and in story, driving a drone from the iPhone, she showed a mini-tour of the exhibition space.

The next line in her resume was the Coachella festival, where she interviewed artists. And the London-based digital lifestyle magazine Dazed invited her to become an art section editor.

The most influential person who is not

All this time, Michaela was a project marked “incognito” - no one knew who was behind her success. But when the name of Brud, a Los Angeles startup led by Trevor McFedries, came up, Michaela's Instagram began to spark dramatic storytelling. I started writing to her Бермуда - a robot who really wanted to make friends with a star. But the blogger rejected her because of too polar outlooks on life. Bermuda, a republican that voted for Trump and despised people as a species, began to threaten to hack a millionaire account if it did not receive an answer.

And now the model publishes a post that Brud all the time lied about its origin. “Now I’m not sure that I can identify myself as a colored woman. My skin color is a choice made by a corporation. My gender is an option on the computer screen. My personality was the choice that Brud made to sell me brands to be on hype. I will never forgive them, ”she writes and leaves the agency.

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Along the path of the existential crisis, she is supported by a friend of Blauco from the same company, but a less popular character (only 145 thousand followers): “I don’t care whether you work for Brud or not. You are my family, and nothing else matters. ” But, after four months of suffering with the new producer, Michaela still returned to Brud.

Since then, Time magazine ranked Michaela among the 25 most influential people on the Internet. Giphy invited her to direct a short film for the Robot Problems festival. She organized "Club 404" with her own merchandise and the series HEROES. Kissed live model Bella Hadid for Calvin Klein's ad campaign and started dating a real guy.

Her colleagues Blauco and Bermuda also had a romantic brawl. The full version can be heard on the Blauco Youtube channel. Their romance ended in 10 joint photos. The guy’s specific humor (he mainly jokes about his sex) finally tired Bermuda, and Blauko was tired of her snobbish attitude.

These two are far from millions of Michaela, even if you add their subscribers together. But at the same time, Blauco lit up in the Italian Vogue, on the cover of Singapore's Esquire, became a Burberry model and the face of Absolut vodka. And the more talkative Bermuda began to tell in detail in an interview about her everyday life: “I usually wake up around 6 in the morning, do smoothies, do Pilates. I want to inspire young entrepreneurs to fulfill their dreams. And I urge women to pursue a career in robotics, historically overshadowed by sexism. ” But her main goal is "to become the most famous robot in the world."

How virtuals change people

Some people believe that virtual models are the future. Firstly, they are cheaper for brands than a full cycle of working with real models. Once invested in the development, the company will be able to use the character at any time and in the way they want. Secondly, one should not expect risks from virtuals. While real models and bloggers have a high human factor (from aging and disease to simple taste), virtual ones easily adapt to the requirements of technical tasks. And the fact that digital people are still not real and cannot be loved by an audience like a living person is only a matter of time.

The second camp is people who see virtuals as a threat. The most controversial was Shudu. First, they discuss the fact that she is a 3D fantasy of a white man. New Yorker journalist Lauren Jackson writes about racial expropriation: a virtual black woman delights the gaze of white people and makes it possible not to interact with real race representatives.

The next claim to digital-influencers is that they demonstrate unattainable beauty parameters. As soon as the body-positive began to achieve its goals, computer-generated models with smooth skin, long legs, a symmetrical face and clear cheekbones immediately appeared. Yes, Cameron Wilson and his agency The Digitals have created a plus-size model of Bren. But if you look at its popularity, it turns out that this is an incomparably low level in relation to Shoud or Mikael - only a couple of thousand.

It turns out that very soon the border between the retouched White Hadid and the new virtual machine will disappear - this is just a matter of technological progress. Previously, the heroines of games with the fifth bust size did not become role models for teenagers, but their arrival on Instagram made this possible. But the desire to be like an unreal character can generate a new wave of transformations in the offices of plastic surgeons. Most likely it will.

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