this could be us but we’re human :(
Exploring Race and Digital Subjecthood Through Shudu and Lil Miquela
When Trevor McFedries and Sara DeCou, the minds behind the LA-based tech start-up Brud, set out to create the first wholly fabricated Instagram influencer, they shrewdly played upon the artificiality and disingenuous presentation which have come to define the platform in its current iteration. Lil Miquela emerged in 2016, and before she was “outed” as fictional (in a brilliant stunt staged by Brud), she was a Brazilian-American social justice warrior and makeup aficionado, a woman who looked about as Facetuned as any other model on the platform. As she gained followers and piqued the interest of fashion corporations, Brud was persuaded to allow her a phone interview with YouTuber Shane Dawson; in response to his questions about her composite identity, she demurred, “Can you name one person on Instagram who doesn’t edit their photos?”
A year later, in 2017, British photographer Cameron-James Wilson created an artificial supermodel of his own, a black woman named Shudu, who quickly acquired her own Instagram presence and prestige modeling gigs. Wilson created Shudu with a program called DAZ 3D and was able to achieve much more minute precision in skin and hair modeling than his counterparts at Brud, producing a truly baffling illusion. Wilson has faced significant (and justified) backlash for his project — he is a white male, and both Shudu and Brenn, her successor, are created to represent black females. More on that later. Also of note: unlike Lil Miquela and her digital companions, Shudu and Brenn exist outside of any narrative, and their Instagram comments come from Wilson’s own perspective.
Both Shudu and Lil Miquela have achieved wide internet popularity, representing the first examples of what may be a long line of startlingly realistic fake internet personalities. This mode of character creation is unprecedented in the history of media; these are inert images which can interact with fans in real time, wear designer brands, and pose alongside real-life friends, thanks to the fast-expanding capabilities of 3D rendering softwares. These digitally generated models provide valuable insight into the future of digital subjecthood, especially where idealized representations of race and gender are created in the absence of a real-life referent.
As media scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser have posited, many emerging genres of digital photo and video encourage a mode of audience engagement which was characteristic of early cinematic and proto-cinematic showcases. These early experiments in the moving image — coined the “Cinema of Attractions” by Tom Gunning — are distinguished by their heightened attention to exhibitionism and self-aware visual gags. As Gunning writes, this cinema “directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle… [here] theatrical display dominates over narrative absorption, emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story” (Gunning, 384).
In her 1981 essay, “Film Body: an Implantation of Perversions”, Linda Williams explores yet another characteristic of the Cinema of Attractions which may be instructive to considering the stakes of new media subjecthood. Williams explores the ways in which the female body is fetishized in the early films of Edward Muybridge and Georges Méliès, noting: “The fetish pleasure is strongest at the moment the ‘theatre of shadows’ first emerges, when audiences — like the audiences who first viewed the projection of moving bodies by Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope — are still capable of amazement at the magical abilities of the machine itself” (Williams, 28). Each of these digitally-produced models represents just this kind of technological novelty, which in the cases of Lil Miquela, Shudu, and Brenn double as exhibitions of feminized and racialized bodies. To this day, years after Lil Miquela’s release, fan engagements with her profile remain largely divided into two camps: those continuing to express their disbelief that she could be a technological creation, and those evaluating and commenting on her “female” body. Despite the narrative content she transmits, Instragram users continue to interact with her character far more readily as technological or erotic spectacle.
Below are an assortment of comments culled from her 2018 posts:
Where Brud’s project involves the creation of a multiple-character narrative universe, as much aesthetic experiment as exploration of the transmedial affordances of digital platforms, Wilson’s attention is focused on optical illusion. Shudu and Brenn are two-dimensional media figures in that they behave far more like painted images than the media- and narrative-rich characters we have come to expect from digital encounters. They are both wholly exteriorized, fully body, fully race, fully pose, in a manner reminiscent of what Timothy Mitchell has called the framing of the “object-world” in nineteenth-century showcases of colonial/imperial might. The imperative to render the Other in a portrait which distills difference, which “set[s] the world up as a picture” (Mitchell, 220), and creates a hierarchy between the spectator and the sanitized, simulated representation laid out before him, continues to be apparent in these computer-generated subaltern subjects. In direct relation to race in new media subject, Alexander Galloway offers: “Racial coding has not gone away in recent years, it has only migrated into the realm of the dress rehearsal, the realm of pure simulation, and as simulation it remains absolutely necessary.” (Galloway, 113).
Much of the backlash directed at Wilson for his creations has centered around his decision to produce images of blackness without interacting with any black subjects, prompting comparisons to blackface and other instances of cultural appropriation. In Captive Bodies: Postcolonial Subjectivity in Cinema, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster brings forward theorist and former model Elizabeth Hollander’s comment that when she was modeling, her “‘ position could not be defined by [the photographer], even if my physical pose was,’” arguing that even as captive body in the power paradigm of fashion, models have some “control over embodied space” (Foster, 10). What, then, does it mean for models to lose not only their control over their pose, but their position as well? The erasure of a model’s interiority promotes a wholly new meaning to the term “objectification”, deploying the racial and gender markings of a body to corporate ends without possible resistance from the subject.
In response to Lisa Nakamura’s analysis of contemporary ads as socially “corrective texts” Alondra Nelson writes: “Representations of race and ethnicity created a cognitive dissonance in tech advertising; dissimilitude was slyly neutralized but never fully erased, for this alterity was necessary to the ideology of the technology being sold” (Nelson, 5). Each of these fictional digital subjects is sustained through the promotion of brands and corporate partnerships, a relationship which is typical in the contemporary Instagram landscape, but which becomes all the more striking when it constitutes a central thread of digital subaltern identity. As these figures inevitably become more numerous and their narratives more widely consumed, it will continue to be crucially important to remain vigilant of the stories they express and the corporate ends to which they are deployed.
Works Cited
Dawson, Shane. “CONSPIRACY THEORIES & INTERVIEW WITH LIL MIQUELA.” YouTube, YouTube, 18 Sept. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdNYAiU-SLI.
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Captive Bodies: Postcolonial Subjectivity in Cinema. State University of New York Press, 1999.
Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, edited by Wanda Strauven, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2006, pp. 381–388. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n09s.27.
Mitchell, Timothy. “The World as Exhibition.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 31, no. 2, 1989, pp. 217–236. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/178807.
Nakamura, Lisa and Peter Chow-White, Race After the Internet. Routledge, 2012.
Nelson, Alondra. “Introduction.” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 2, 2002, pp. 1–15.
Williams, Linda. “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions.” Cine-Tracts, vol. 3, no. 4, ser. 12, 1981, pp. 19–35. 12, doi:http://dl.icdst.org/pdfs/files/17cfd1ab5d9dbdd84930c42b4024d126.pdf.
