Virtual Idol: A social enzyme for empathy across time and space

If you briefly trace the history of virtual idols, you can find that they originated from the Japanese otaku culture and belong to a kind of "cultivation" youth subculture. With the Japanese bubble economy, Japanese youth entertained themselves and escaped in manga, animation, and games, thus forming a "otaku culture", and virtual idols gradually became the spiritual sustenance of young people. This sustenance develops from simple worship to active "cultivation" to achieve the externalization of self-worth. With the development of online social platforms, making friends with fans has become one of the trendy two-dimensional trends.

Online and offline, a social enzyme that aggregates fan creativity

In 2007, the virtual idol Hatsune Mirai appeared. The music and anime and manga works created by netizens around her have been widely disseminated on social platforms such as Niconico (a well-known Danmaku website in Japan).

Virtual idols become social enzymes that aggregate fan ideas. Netizens use this as a common topic to create and upload the results to social platforms for fans to watch and make more fans, thus forming a temporary, mobile but also containing common interests in the fan community.

The fragmentation of netizen creations has formed a strong community subculture, which some Japanese social media researchers have named "collaboration without collaboration". Virtual idol works are generated in "collaboration without collaboration", which also allows virtual idols to "break the circle" from subculture to a broader network pop culture.

If "Hatsune Mirai" is popular on the Internet and provides original support for its commercialization, then holding "Hatsune Mirai" concerts is to push virtual idols into offline public space, making it an important part of popular culture.

This push is global, accumulating a large number of fans, including Chinese youth. At the end of 2017, "Hatsune Mirai" held a concert in Shanghai, with a maximum ticket price of 1480 yuan, which won the crazy support of fans, and its masterpiece "Onion Song" became a popular song that many people can hum a few words.

This is still from China's first virtual idol talent competition program "Transdimensional Rising Star". Two virtual idols appear on the same stage at the same time to bring performances to the audience

2017 was a year of active domestic virtual idols. Among them, Luo Tianyi, who has been "debuting" for 5 years, also held his first offline concert in Shanghai, and his first 500 in-house tickets sold out in 3 minutes, which was no less popular than the live idol concert. According to the "Virtual Digital Person In-depth Industry Report" released by the qubit think tank of market research institutions, it is estimated that by 2030, the overall market size of virtual people in the mainland will reach 270 billion yuan.

Empathy across time and space: Virtual idols go mainstream

Virtual idols gradually became regulars at various David TV evenings. At the beginning of 2016, Luo Tianyi sang a song with a live singer at the Hunan Satellite TV Small Chinese New Year's Eve Gala. At the 2018 Jiangsu Satellite TV New Year's Eve Party, another live-action singer sang the theme song of the animated movie "Frozen" with Luo Tianyi.

In 2022, on the night of the opening ceremony of the "Meet in Beijing" Olympic Cultural Festival, Beijing Tianqiao Art Center staged a large-scale comprehensive literary and art evening of "We See You in Beijing". Luo Tianyi appeared with a number of Olympic champions, and the shining youth vitality echoed with the spirit of the Winter Olympics.

The mainstream media borrows virtual idols to get more attention, and virtual idols also borrow mainstream media to get more fans. Behind the popularity of the performance is the integration and recognition of the virtual idol culture by the mainstream media.

However, it wasn't until the metaverse concept became popular that virtual idols that relied on holographic projection support really became the focus of the party. Before the metaverse, people saw more virtual-real interactions on television; after the metaverse, virtual idols could present virtual-real composite space-time empathy. Although the concept of the metacosm is still vague, it can be grasped that it has the purpose of breaking the virtual-real binary relationship and moving from interface to space.

At the 2022 Jiangsu Satellite TV New Year's Eve concert, the late singer Teresa Teng reappeared with the support of holographic projection, and realized the cross-time and space duet of classic songs with live singers. In this process, the classic revisiting and era memories are realized through the intermediary of virtual idols.

This kind of cross-time empathy forms a new paradigm of cultural production, and people reconstruct a new "composite space" in the practice of expanding reality and holographic projection and other immersive technologies. In the "composite space", people's actions in the virtual dimension and the real dimension are synchronic and co-existent. The cross-time empathy of virtual idols is generated in the "composite space", and at the same time, the "composite space" is constructed and maintained.

Distant consumption, mediated emotions

The essence of virtual idols is cultural products. Behind this cultural product is capital support, media support and fan emotional consumption. But we can't help but think: What is the difference between the emotional consumption of virtual idols compared to previous cultural products?

Virtual idols in cyberspace, "they" are created and popularized in "collaboration without collaboration". Classical artworks are unique, while industrially produced works of art such as films can be reproduced. Virtual idols seem to be both unique and reproducible, both for creating personal works of art and for being copied. Between uniqueness and replicability, virtual idols become the intermediary of people's emotional projection. If Teresa Teng's holographic projection and live singers sing together across time and space evoke people's emotional memories, then such emotional memories are "mediated" emotions.

"Mediation" includes different levels of audiovisual representation, media communication, and technical support, which occur in synchronicity. If audiovisual representation and media communication are representations, technical support is implicit. This implicitness is the fundamental support for "mediating" emotions.

"Mediating" emotions is a kind of distant consumption. The "remote presence" here does not refer to the distance of the physical distance, but to the hidden nature of the technology. Furthermore, the essence of "mediated" emotion is the "technicalization" of emotion. This "technicalization" is not that our emotions are dominated by technology, but that technology can produce emotions, and "technical" emotions become part of our emotions. If society is seen as a "network of actors" described by the sociologist Latour, then the virtual idols produced by digital technology are not only intermediaries, but also "actors" of society.

Source: Half Moon Talk Internal Edition, No. 4, 2022

Author: Yang Guangying (The author is an associate professor at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts) | Editor: Zheng Xuejing

Editor-in-charge: Qin Daixin

Proofreader: Huang Chenxi (Intern)