The Rise of Virtual Humans

Virtual Humans in Art

Virtual humans are already being used widely in the art world, with Cinema 4D and Blender being the most common applications, closely followed by Unreal Engine and others.

There are two distinct camps in the arts when it comes to virtual humans. There are those that create fictional portraits of different characters, characters that are rarely reused.

To name just a few of these artists, we have artists like Fvckrender, Xeus, Push, Catelloo, and Marcelo Cantu.  Each of these artists brings a new and unique aesthetic to their virtual humans, laying the groundwork for an entirely new genre of portraiture and character creation. 

Then there are artists who create characters that carry over across pieces, developing more depth and narrative. 

Alexy Préfontaine’s Aeforia is a five-piece autobiographical piece created to express the process of growing up and finding one’s own identity and place in the universe. The sole character is accompanied in each piece by the enlivening anima of another magical virtual creature: a bejeweled dragonfly representing the spirit that leads to self-discovery. 

LaTurbo Avedon is an artist who lives entirely in and across virtual worlds. She is a digital manifestation without a real-world referent, a being that has never existed outside of a computer. Though she is recognizable from platform to platform, her image does shift as technology changes. Avedon is an artist and curator who creates digital sculptures and environments with a complete disregard for physicality. 

The three characters in LEViT∆TE’s Legacy Series appear across ten short films that, taken together, form a borderline-feature film built entirely by the artist in Unreal Engine. While the pieces in the Legacy Series took over a year of 12-hour days to create, LEViT∆TE acknowledges and awaits the developments that will even further democratize the creative possibilities of audio-visual art. 

Other virtual humans seem to straddle the border between influencer and art project, such as Ruby Gloom (aka ruby9100m), who describes herself as a “transhuman” virtual being who blurs the line between man and machine and has worked with brands and celebrities like Grimes, Nike, Fendi, and virtual fashion house The Fabricant. 

Androgynous it-girl Jazzelle Zanaughtti (better known as Ugly Worldwide) has created her own virtual avatar to accommodate impossible fashions and settings.

For a stunning primer on how artists are using virtual humans and settings to create work that could never be reproduced in the real world, one need look no further than H+ Agency, which represents Alexy Préfontaine, Jason Ebeyer, Chad Knight, Bloo Woods, and Giant Swan, among so many other brilliant 3D artists.

Outroduction

The concept of authenticity is increasingly under dispute, and the rise of virtual humans makes it even thornier. AI art is calling into question the underlying assumption that handwork or manual creation is what makes art art — though the assumptions underlying “what art is” have been under fire for a long time, with everyone from Pollock and Rothko to Duchamps and Yves Klein chipping away at any possible definition.

But that might be a different conversation because, in all of those instances, I just referred to people doing things. 

How does one describe the work of LaTurbo Avedon? How does one attribute humanity to Shudu Gram? When a comely virtual influencer is hawking $20 bottle-pressed juice to its 5MM followers, who will call that authentic?

On the other hand of such trepidation, it’s hard to not feel some frisson of excitement that artists, filmmakers, and musicians are quite near a tipping point when the pipeline from vision to finished product is reduced to a single workflow. 

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