"What is reality these days?"
There's a moment in the film Woodstock where Sha Na Na are on stage and you realise they have enough group members to raise a football team and one sub. The Japanese 'band' AKB48 would shout 'pah!' at that observation, seeing as they have 58 full members (in four teams), but the story of AKB48 has taken an interesting twist overnight and fans of teenage girls wearing school uniforms are reeling from the news.
It has been revealed that a member of Japan's biggest girl band does not actually exist. Not in the sense that Andrew Ridgley didn't exist musically, Aimi Eguchi, the newest member of the group, is in fact a computer-generated avatar, a digital creation made up from features of six of the other girls.
Now I know that you can do wonders with digital technology these days, I have spent time carefully removing people from photographs I didn't want them in, but this takes things to a whole new level, one that you don't need the cheat codes to!
Well teenage girls aren't daft, well not all the time, and there was a suspicion that things were odd when Eguchi was chosen as the public face of an ice cream campaign - this level of public endorsement is usually given to the more senior members of the group, some of the more astute fanbase also noticed a more than passing resemblance to some of the members. Well this week the groups management company released a video showing Aimi Eguchi being created.
David Sinclair, music critic for The Times, told Sky News: "What is reality these days? You have a lot of people, a lot of images that can be created very quickly and very easily. People have avatars on social networking sites, whole films are made of avatars. It's the world we live in.This doesn't surprise me about Japan. They've always been ahead of the game."
It has been revealed that a member of Japan's biggest girl band does not actually exist. Not in the sense that Andrew Ridgley didn't exist musically, Aimi Eguchi, the newest member of the group, is in fact a computer-generated avatar, a digital creation made up from features of six of the other girls.
Now I know that you can do wonders with digital technology these days, I have spent time carefully removing people from photographs I didn't want them in, but this takes things to a whole new level, one that you don't need the cheat codes to!
Well teenage girls aren't daft, well not all the time, and there was a suspicion that things were odd when Eguchi was chosen as the public face of an ice cream campaign - this level of public endorsement is usually given to the more senior members of the group, some of the more astute fanbase also noticed a more than passing resemblance to some of the members. Well this week the groups management company released a video showing Aimi Eguchi being created.
David Sinclair, music critic for The Times, told Sky News: "What is reality these days? You have a lot of people, a lot of images that can be created very quickly and very easily. People have avatars on social networking sites, whole films are made of avatars. It's the world we live in.This doesn't surprise me about Japan. They've always been ahead of the game."
1 comment:
ah, the Japanese and school girl uniforms...real schoolgirl skirts getting shorter and shorter too...but that isn't the story here; wasn't this inevitable and as Sincalir says Japan were always likely to be the first. Much of what we watched as sci-fi is already here.
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