Film and Audiovisual Media colloquium – Christopher Holliday (King’s College London): Imitation of Life: Likeness and ‘Smartness’ in the Digital Replication of Celebrity

From Deepfakes and virtual holography to digitally-enabled posthumous performances and digital de-aging, the contemporary era of synthetic media production has appeared to culminate the much-anticipated “crisis in the conception of acting” that was first heralded as a defining feature of the computer age (Wojcik 2006: 71), a crisis that was conceived largely in relation to early-2000s anxieties around Hollywood’s growing reliance upon synthespians, virtual actors, avatars, and proxies (King 2011). Yet if computer replication has progressively re-negotiated what Christine Geraghty has called the “work of acting” (2000: 192), then the recent 2023 SAG-AFTRA industrial action concerned with artificial intelligence and machine learning has only intensified issues around the digitisation of bodies via the question of who can – and does – ‘own’ the star as a valuable data asset.

This talk maps the current ‘state-of-the-art’ with regards to the industrial and cultural narratives of synthetic media, looking specifically at the exchange between screen acting, the labour of self-performance, branding, and notions of consent within increasing digital intervention. It explores these concerns via current intersections between celebrity and advanced digital technologies that produce new modes of digital identity (the ‘smart star’) alongside the asset value and cultural power of this interactive virtual stardom (‘smart stardom’). By identifying how stars have increasingly and ‘smartly’ complied with virtual production processes and smart technologies, this talk reflects on how shifts in computer VFX since the turn of the millennium have renewed the star’s profitable function as a converging site of labour, capital, and technology.

For more information, please contact Miklós Kiss.