Performing Virtual YouTubers: Acting Across Borders in the Platform Society

Link to article: Performing Virtual YouTubers: Acting Across Borders in the Platform Society, in Japan’s Contemporary Media Culture between Local and Global: Content, Practice and Theory. Ed. Martin Roth, Hiroshi Yoshida, and Martin Picard (Berlin: CrossAsia, 2021), 187-222.

This chapter focuses on Virtual YouTubers (or Vtubers: actors using 3D model anime-like characters to post on YouTube), examining how they are performed through two modes of acting utilized in concert with certain technologies: embodied acting (where unique gestures express individualized personality) in the usage of motion-capture, and figurative acting (where pre-existing codified gestures constitute characters) in the facial expressions from anime performed on a digital avatar after getting filtered through facial recognition technology. Analyzing the varying tendencies of embodied and figurative acting of Vtubers, this chapter concentrates on the popular Vtuber Kizuna Ai, who is an “official cultural diplomat” for Japan, but also has an official Chinese “version” of herself on BiliBili. Her existence across platforms, nations, and languages raises questions about the contemporary intersection between digital, national, and cultural boundaries, and how we perform ourselves in digital media. Kizuna AI’s character performance operates across technologies and platforms in a manner which brings into relief how the contemporary tensions between distinction and duplication play out in our transnational, (trans-)platform society as we perform at the intersection of different modes of selfhood.