“Something to hum while thinking about the end of the world”: Hatsune Miku’s Vocaloid Opera
Last night I saw a pop star, an international celebrity with adoring fans who imitate her style and travel miles to see her. A true global phenomenon. Hatsune Miku took the stage of Paris’s 150 year-old Théâtre du Châtelet dressed in a series of outfits drawn exclusively from Marc Jacobs’s forthcoming spring collection for Louis Vuitton. Her voice soared above a torrent of cascading string arpeggios, white noise bursts, and digital glitches, all emanating from one man with a wild hairdo hunched over in a booth towards the back of the stage, albeit dispersed about the room through a 10.2 channel surround sound system. The stage was decked with vast screen walls receiving over 10,000 lumens from seven different projectors.
So far, par for the course in an age when spectacular concerts are increasingly a major source of revenue for singers worldwide. Except for one thing: Hatsune Miku never stopped off those video screens. Because Hatsune Miku does not exist.
In 1996, William Gibson wrote a novel called Idoru about a rock star named Rez who falls in love with a synthetically generated Japanese Idol singer named Rei Toei. As her handler Kuwayama explains, Rei Toei is “the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as ‘desiring machines.’ … aggregates of subjective desire … an architecture of articulated longing …” Her only reality, Rez elaborates “is the realm of ongoing serial creation … Entirely process; infinitely more than the combined sum of her various selves. The platforms sink beneath her, one after another, as she grows denser and more complex…”
By the time Hatsune Miku started playing ‘live’ arena concerts and opening major rock festivals, she was being described in just these terms: as a virtual Idol singer, the endlessly splintered product of a series of ongoing negotiations and collective fantasies on the part of numerous artists, corporate backers, and fans. But she was not designed as an Idoru like Rei Toei. The creation of Hatsune Miku was much closer to the programming of a new guitar plug-in on Garageband than the grooming of a new pop star.
11/23/13 at 9:07pm
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