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Digital Practice And Virtual Identity

This project will discuss the conditions that created  by the development of digital technology for the virtual identities, as well as the impact on society under the prevalence of virtual identities.

produced by: Yi Zhou

Concept 

The development of digital technology has provided many new ways for people to communicate, develop social relationships and entertainment methods, but also challenges us to rethink about love and friendship from a new perspective, new forms of work, entertainment and learning methods, political cognition ways and ways of thinking about self-identity. I will discuss the prevalence of Virtual Influencer (such as Japanese Virtual idol and instagram Virtual Influencer), what technical support does digital technology provide for Virtual Influencer, and discuss the application and demand of digital practice from the perspective of digital witness.

In 2017, the world's first virtual singer, Hatsune, was born in Japan in the future, and the concept of Virtual  Influencer was taking shape. Virtual Influencer refers to a virtual image created by humans and performing activities in the virtual or real world. With the breakthroughs in technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the development of virtual idols is on the market. Virtual Idol Operation Augmented Reality Virtual Reality Artificial Intelligence Holographic Projection Motion Capture 3D Production Speech Synthesis. According to data analysis conducted by HypeAuditor around the world, the core audience of virtual idols is women aged 18 to 24, Real influencer should make almost 4 times more Instagram posts to gain the same number of followers as the Virtual Influencer. and the participation rate of fans in Virtual Influencer activities is three times higher than that of Real Influencer.  In addition to the set character image, the role of virtual idol live broadcast will become full of unknowns with the participation of the person (the actor behind the live broadcast service), they will substitute themselves into the character set, trying to The virtual characters are integrated, and at the same time, their character, life experience and performance skills will be projected onto the virtual image. The relationship between the person and the virtual image is the relationship between reality and illusion. From this perspective, virtual idol live broadcasting is the real-time fusion of the "real" and "virtual" images of voices and interactive actions through the wearable motion capture device or facial capture software. The virtual anchor is neither real nor fake, and the boundary between virtual and real is slowly disappearing. Some people cannot understand the pursuit of virtual idols and think that they are both unreal and meaningless, but the development of network and screen technology, for some young people virtual and reality is no longer important to the public image. “The most prominent feature of the virtual community is its "virtuality" feature, so the "virtual community" is: an online virtual space where people focus on certain needs or interests to communicate, and everyone has different levels of emotional investment in the community. The process extends the commercial and social values.”

To what extent will the popularity of digital practice, VR technology and AR technology change our way of life, in this case, what does virtuality and reality mean to us, and how will it affect our humanity itself? In the future, virtual reality will not only involve sight, hearing, but also smell, touch, and taste, and construct a world similar to the real environment.

Through the above research, I want to use a art work to discuss the impact of digital technology on the authenticity and virtuality of the identity behind the screen with the development of digital. What I want to express is that with the development of technology, technology brings many possibilities. Perhaps in the future, behind these electronic products, the authenticity of identity is no longer important. The use of technology allows us to redefine the identity understanding.

Technical

I used software MAX to make a video, The content of the video is me under the computer camera (means a identity behind the screen). In this project, I mainly used some objects in MAX to do some processing of the picture under the lens. The processing effects are various color squares and pixels. I like to use this effect to express the concept of digital, means that our identity is redefined by digital. Then combine a piece of audio with the picture, and the picture effect changes as the audio changes. Audio is composed of various sounds that represent digital, I downloaded these sounds on the public sound website.

 

References

Baudrillard J. The Consumer Society Myths and Structures - Theory, Culture & Society. 27 Dec 016. SAGE Publications.

John Hagel III, Arthur G. Armstrong, Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities, Harvard Business Review Press 1997. ISBN 978-0-87584-759-7.

H Jones R, Chik A, A Hafner C. Discourse and Digital Practices, Doing discourse analysis in the digital age. 11 February 2015. London.

https://hypeauditor.com/blog/the-top-instagram-virtual-influencers-in-2019/#number

https://publicseminar.org/2018/05/five-theses-on-virtual-reality-and-sociality/