The making of popstar fembots: Participation, co-creation, or online cultural exploitation?

Abstract

Access to the Internet, technological advances and the digitization of our daily lives have given rise to different forms of cultural participation and artistic expression. These incorporate technologies that make it possible to digitize the human body and the embodiment of a digital self in the form of an avatar. The democratization of these technologies has favored the emergence of a recurring figure, that of the fembot pop star: a virtual influencer, whose field of activity is integrated into that of the music industry and can extend to fields contemporary art or even politics. As a hybrid product resulting from the fusion of the arts, corporate marketing and collaborative computing, combining human and machine, the fembot pop star brings new technical, artistic, social and aesthetic experiences—paving the way for a new ontology of cultural participation as a commercialized collective techno-creativity.