Pygmannequin
PART 4: Corpo - Real!

In 2020-2021, at the height of a global pandemic, venture capital firms suddenly invested a hundreds of millions of dollars into “Virtual Influencer” startups (54) (55). It was seen as the start of a transformation of how Products would be introduced to the general public. Instead of the terribly Millenial model of influencer marketing, where real people take on sponsorships on their social media platforms, Virtual Influencers, or "VI’s" would give brands the opportunity to set out their own vision for who could be an ambassador for their product.

3D CG, Robotics, AI and Web 3. As though they were blessed by the future itself, corporations could use these tools to redefine what an influencer could be, at a whole new level of interaction and intimacy.

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This was synthesis of the Mannequin and Megacelebrity.

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Rewinding a bit, I’ll give 3 explanations for what a Virtual Influencer is, and I'll let you choose which one works best.

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1. A virtual influencer is essentially whatever you imagine a traditional influencer is, except they are not a real person.

2. A ‘virtual influencer’ is a new avenue for companies to build fanbases directly, by creating custom individuals from scratch.

3. A ‘virtual influencer’ is a digital mannequin, controlled by a business, to sell products.

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Companies including Brazilian supermarket giant Magulu, then more recently, Brud, The Digitals, Aww inc, declared they had found a new conceptual netherworld, a supposedly new category between people, and brands which on the face of it, sounds revolutionary, if you are willing to forget that digital mascots for Bands (The Gorillaz) or music adjacent companies (Hatsuni Miku) had been successful for well over a decade prior.

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Nonetheless in the English speaking world, Virtual Influencers seemed to generate, stoke and create their own hype, on their own platforms, but also in large media publications. For these startups, driving clicks was the aim. In 2019 through to 2021 just about every fashion or tech publication was filling their boots with features on the Virtual Influencer.

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More info

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What do they mean for the future of our culture?  What’s “problematic” about them?(56) “Interviewing” them (57), and when they were feeling really adventurous, musing about how this is a strange, strange future indeed.

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‘Brazilian American’ Influencer LilMiquela was the poster child of most of this coverage and defined the possibilities and the pitfalls of what a virtual influencer was. At time of writing she has 2.5 million followers on her instagram, and she was created by Los Angeles Media agency Brud, although this connection was a secret for a two year period from May 2016 to the end of April 2018 ​​while the account grew to around a million followers.

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Like a lot of Americans, Miquela’s a Latina . A hustler. A creative. A “hot mess” navigating the minefield of capital, heartbreak and the attention economy, she’s trying to do the right thing, while being aware of her own platform and the privileges afforded to her. Aren’t we all?

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For purposes of simplicity, when I say LilMiquela does this or that, what I actually mean is Brud, the agency which created her, does this or that.

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From her experimental beginnings, Brud executives Trevor Mcfedries, Sara Decou and Nicole de Ayor turned her into an attention grabbing, and investment attracting business (58). Most recently she’s promoted Cashapp  and BMW.

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Brud has experimented with creating a wide roster of characters to create stories and drama around their tentpole account, and also to expand their commercial opportunities - although none of these accounts had anything close to the same success as the original Miquela.

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From 2016 through to 2021, LilMiquela’s stats continued to grow, not to Superstar levels, but she was receiving Superstar levels of exposure in the press and on billboards. By twist of fate, she was on TV, advertising Samsung Galaxy phones (59), she was hosting interviews for Coachella (60), and her campaign for Calvin Klein, no less, co-starred mega celebrity Bella Hadid (61) – who by contrast has 60 million followers on instagram.

Nonetheless from a popular Video by YouTuber Shane Dawson where he “talks to a robot”(62), her controversial queer kiss with Hadid, and her staged relationship drama with her boyfriend and CG Influencer "Blawko", people were intrigued… but mainly confused.

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The air was thick with mystery, very few people knew the company pulling the strings behind this newly minted icon. Her old Instagram posts are littered with random accounts asking if she is “real” or if she is “AI” or “CG”. Lilmiquela herself doesn’t help matters at all, describing herself as ‘Robot’ or ‘Robot queen of Web 3’. There were people playing along with her fiction, but if LilMiquela was roleplaying as a human influencer, then for the time being, her followers were roleplaying as fans.

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The entity known as LilMiquela had financial backing and influence like Evelyn Nesbitt’s Stanford White, and she was also blessed with the inhuman mystique of Lester Gaba’s business partner of plaster and wax.

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You know, you only think of mannequins sometimes only to display the merchandise - but it’s more than that: people really think of them as people, as the ideal person, because that’s the ideal body underneath there making that thing look dynamite…Even the face of the mannequin becomes very important to them; i mean they can be turned off by a face, or violently opposed to a face.

Guy Scarangello: New York Visual Display Merchandiser, quoted in ‘Vital Mummies’ by Sarah Schneider (63)

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LilMiquela looks unusual. She doesn’t appear to have a specific ethnic background, she wears her hair in buns, sometimes dyed, she has a gap between her two front teeth and her eyebrows are scraggly and unmanaged. Brud founder and creator of Miquela, Trevor Mcfedries, drew from his personal experience growing up and being “othered”:

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“I was too black for the white kids and too black for the white kids.”  (64)

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"And thinking abut creating a character new character in Miquela, I often try to think about where there's cultural white space...where are these emergent subcultures that kind of need a rockstar personality" (65)

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McFedries tried to create universal appeal out of Miquela’s quirks. With Miquela, he and his team had created an interface for people to not feel as alone, she was someone who they could look up to, who could say and demonstrate that it’s okay, even an advantage to be different. Even though her account may not yet have reached the same heights as the Bella Hadid’s of this world, it s execution was successful, and ultimately played into McFedries long-term plan: to cultivate an audience of loyal fans who would follow their virtual idol towards a big new venture.

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"I'd known legacy celebrity to be something where you saw this person and you'd tremble or you'd faint...and then there was a kind of emergent YouTuber celebrity where they would see them and they would run up to them and hug them...and I wanted to be able to split the difference." (66)

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By designing Miquela to be as human as possible, including political opinions, open activism for Black Lives Matter, music projects and tell-all vlogs, he wanted to create narratives that would influence the decisions, and opinions of people on a scale and a depth completely inaccessible to governments or to brands, even most celebrities. The team of multidisciplinary creatives which make up the Brud staff had a unique kind of freedom and security to express themselves behind a comfy buffer of pseudonymity. They were free from any fear of personal attribution, punishment or the most painful of all online conditions: irrelevance.

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 (67)

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This was not an experiment in AI or Robotics, it was pushing how human a corporation could be, and it would again invent new products to hang on its mannequin.

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Instagram was never the end goal for Mcfedries or Dacou, recent migration to TikTok and change of online content to Video has made building a brand and making content with Virtual Influencers difficult, for now. In 2023, new features of AI have made generating still images extremely easy. For more or less deceptive reasons, there are scores of people using new open source image generators like Stable Diffusion to manaufacture content for new influencers(68). In other words, individual opportunists are doing exactly what Brud started doing with a team of paid professionals, eight years ago.

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But... even beyond present day Tiktok, the current platform selection doesn't offer the sense of immersion or interactivity with our worlds that VR or AR experiences have been predicting for at least the last 20 years. And the influence large content aggregators like Twitch or Youtube have on what content looks like, or how people interact, first limits the creativity of the maker, and then for good measure, robs them blind.

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This is how the world is 'unmasked' according to people who are invested in the crypto community, they believe that with the use of Crypto Currency and DAO’s (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations), mass investment and adoption into the system by ordinary folks, they can take considerable control away from traditional banks and also the vast monopolies of traditional media.

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McFedries imagined LilMiquela as the figurehead of a ship sailing into the Crypto Space. She would encourage people to make the journey into the world of decentralised currency and altered value. In this world, LilMiquela’s virtual clothes would be for sale, audiences could pay to influence her storylines, even the whole brand of LilMiquela would in a sense, 'go public' as an asset to be speculated on through the blockchain, with interfaces made from scratch by the decentralised organisation.

Brud and Mcfedries would, of course, make their money, but their broader and entirely separate aim is to build an Ark for a soon-to-be liberated world of truly untethered commerce, free* from gatekeepers, where online social interaction and speculative investment become the same thing.

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(69)

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Plenty of criticisms have been thrown in Brud’s direction, but it seems the limitations of the social media platforms ran parallel with exactly how authentic Miquela’s character could be. Her authenticity, the politics of her appearance and her experiences could only run so deep.

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In 2019 LilMiquela posted a youtube video telling a story about how she was sexually assaulted in a taxi.

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(70)

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The reaction from those who saw and heard about this was mostly disgust and to use the internet native, 'cringe'. It was seen as deeply immoral for a company to pose as a woman who had had a traumatic experience lived by many people(71), when the story had never happened, and the company which produced the video was effectively...

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"headless"

Free from accountability, uncancellable.

Brud quickly removed the video from Miquela’s Youtube Channel. This obviously felt more like a ret-con of an unsuccessful storyline about an assault, a PR move, rather than an assault that actually happened.

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In her book ‘Vital Mummies’ Sarah Schneider frequently compares the shop window displays to theatrical stages and their Mannequins like performers. Window Display artists over the years have created arrangements with certain social themes (72), but these spaces are acknowledged to be imaginary.

Mannequins appear to be human, but I hope it’s fair to say everyone has some idea of what a Mannequin actually is. You have a sense of their material, and you know you could take their arms and legs off. No matter what they appear to be doing, they are staging a play and inviting you in to imagine.

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Brud takes things a step further, to convincingly imply their CG character is self-aware, has feelings, has a body. Miquela lives a similar life to her audience, and to their network and other celebrities on their feed. Everyone  shares the same platform, and so there’s no great demand to imagine. On Tiktok, or Instagram, the stage is already set.

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On top of affecting the typical YouTube vlog style, Miquela's sexual assault actually skirts quite creatively around the relevant social issue. According to her, she was non-consentually touched by a man because he thought she was a robot, not because she appeared to be either a woman, or trans, or 'other' in some other way.

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"explore themes of otherness"

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Brud wants to creatively and provocatively simulate a conscious person through the narrow filter of social media.

How she interacts with social media is plausibly real, but as a character, her experiences are either impossible or completely unverifiable. However sincere Mcfedries’ intentions were, LilMiquela identifying as ‘Robot’ as a proxy to using real world identities, wrung a bit hollow as she seemed ready to pick and choose what experiences of oppression to pick up and drop, a bit like a child with their toys.

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Art Critic Rob Horning linked Miquela’s success to the very fact that she is comfortably divorced from political reality (73), that people could use her account as a source of positivity and escape. This may be true, but her account complicates things. Her ironically deleted instagram page “Club404NotFound” promoted black and queer artists, but in videos, it feels like she’s awkwardly shoehorned in alongside real artists (74). Recent comments have asked her for a stance on Israel and Palestine:

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But like many companies, Brud has avoided the issue at all costs, to keep their fanbase intact and to protect their business interests.

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It’s with similar confidence that the “world’s first virtual influencer with Downs Syndrome” was created by British Fashion Photographer turned 3D artist: Cameron James Wilson. His agency “The Diigitals” and collaborators (Ad Agency Forsman & Bodenfors and Downs Syndrome International) created Kami (75)

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Kami was made with assistance of AI and 100 women with Down Syndrome who submitted their faces to be combined into a 3D model made to represent the Downs community (76). Kami was unveiled in a virtual gallery. Her stated aim was to

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(77)

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Kami also stated there are people with Down’s contributing to her page.

Kami is one of the reasons I wanted to start researching this project. As someone who has grown up around people with learning impairments, I wanted to investigate.

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Inauthentic, fake, cringe, are the ultimate destabilising insults to anyone with a platform online, because of the trust an audience lends to the people they follow, and the idea of people with Downs idolising, being advertised products to, and being politically represented by an account which on top of it all, may be moderated by people who don't know the real problems people with Downs face - seemed odd to me, to say the least.

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In that gold rush period over the pandemic, the startups that generated Miquela and Kami among others, combined personality with product, with the assumption that the "regular shmegular" thing to do was sell, and that's all they could do. Capital had been invested, and that money had to be recouped.

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The narrow filter of social media is further crystallised by cold hard cash. Unlike a real person, who may feel reluctant to use social media for profit, Virtual Influencers had no choice.

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From the Kouros statues of Ancient Greece, to dreams about a future economy, it’s becoming clear that Mannequins don’t only sell clothes, they also sell a particular vision of the future. Charles’ Dana Gibson’s liberal vision for the evolution of beauty:

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Why should women not be beautiful increasingly?

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Is moved into a virtual world. In this ideal future, specifics are averaged out and so material realities pale into irrelevance. the Greek idea of an afterlife earned by sacrifice, and the Virtual Mannequin both purify and average individuals into a “snackable” oneness, a kind of human essence, that is promoted as beautiful, and seems just about close enough to attain.

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"then there was a kind of emergent YouTuber celebrity where they would see them and they would run up to them and hug them...and I wanted to be able to split the difference."

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This is a world, where on the one hand, by virtue of being human, everyone is seen to be equal, but on the other, each individual has an identity completely untethered from the physical world, like a soul.

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In the imaginations of entrepreneurs, The Metaverse is on the one hand, an escape, a world where you are free to take on any identity, but it’s also a space where bets are off and identity like race, or downs becomes monetisable and accessorisable, your identity doesn’t change where you are permitted to be, or put you in any physical danger or poverty. So promoting:

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“diversity within the Metaverse” (81)

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Seems to have a slightly different meaning than in any other context. And to keep comparing apples to oranges, the fictional sexual assault of LilMiquela, has almost no significance compared to the actual assault of Evelyn Nesbit.

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PART 5: Yeah yeah, but what happened to Lester Gaba and his Mannequin?

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When I look in the mirror, I hardly ever think about the reality. Like a machine, my body can be taken apart, fingers, legs, frontal lobe, and the more I take away, the less of myself I seem to have left. But the strange story of my soul is that I am just one thing, a manageable oneness.

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At around the same time Gaba was carrying Cynthia to cocktail parties in Manhattan, the surrealist art movement was gaining popularity, mannequins feature in their painting and sculpture as tools to draw a metaphorical connection between our 'selves' and our bodies, they took mannequins apart as a way to reveal how people are, like mannequins, opaquely modular and divided. Shops used deconstructed mannequin shapes to tell stories in their displays, to highlight products, to draw attention to and create objects of symbolic desire (82).

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"It was precisely surrealism’s ability to juxtapose the real and the unreal that made it a primary form of advertising and media expression” (83)

Richard martin via sarah schneider

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For a real world example, shop owners under State laws in Iraq and more recently Afghanistan have had to cover the heads of their female mannequins, or literally saw off their hands and breasts.

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At different times, the religious governments of these two states decreed what parts of a woman’s body are and are not permitted to be desired by either sex, and in a flurry to comply, shop owners hid or physically removed the offending objects. The conspicuous absence of basic body features of women, became a strange symbol for cultural fetishes, and destruction of freedom for women: Their anatomy and their autonomy. The decision to “Islamiscise”(84) or desexualise mannequins in this way shows that mannequins can stand alone to define what is safe, as well as what is desirable or beautiful.

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 (85)

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At the beginning of America’s involvement in World War two, Lester Gaba had grown disenchanted with his mannequin companion Cynthia, so he entrusted her safety to a friend. Maintaining the fiction of her humanity, Gaba instructed them to treat Cynthia like any other normal guest. But a twist of fate left her on the floor of a barber shop, shattered into a thousand pieces (86).

Although Gaba could have and did replace Cynthia, to eyewitnesses and the columnists who covered the story, this was as good a symbolic ending as any. The myth of her humanity was smashed because she just couldn’t be put back together.

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In the 1950s, Gaba tried to recapture Cynthia’s celebrity by investing the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a robotic system to animate her and give her a voice. He wanted her to host a TV talkshow

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Attempts to resurrect Cynthia faltered and were eventually abandoned. By his account, Gaba left Cynthia in a friend’s attic, where she was lost forever (87).

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“Cynthia was both a merchandising gimmick and the eternal female”(88)

"Stay and mourn at the monument of dead Kroisos" (89)

“If I’m 19 forever, who’s this baby?” (90)

Modern mannequins follow the influences of mass production, they’re light, cheap to manufacture, and durable enough to withstand the high foot traffic of commercial stores and the handling of underpaid workers. They’re made out of plastic and fibreglass which take millions of years to degrade. Eventually, at some far flung point in the future, it’s an immutable fact that we will be both outlasted and outnumbered. After conscious thought or record, memory, the Metaverse, under volcanic ash and a yellowish sky, there will be skulls in the ground with large cavities inside that once housed brains, brains which once thought to replicate themselves in stone and plastic. And these skulls will be surrounded on all sides by mannequins, a rough semblance of flesh that once clung to those bones like sculpture.

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The end.