Digital Pop Star Hatsune Miku Teams With Laurel Halo

Digital Pop Star Hatsune Miku Teams With Laurel Halo

Photo via Hatsune Miku’s Facebook

Digital pop star Hatsune Miku recently announced her first headlining tour in North America. As Thump points out, Miku is also heading to Berlin’s CTM festival for “Still Be Here”, a performance and art installation created in collaboration with Laurel Halo and digital artists Martin Sulzer, Darren Johnston, and LaTurbo Avedon. (It was inspired by the work of conceptual artist Mari Matsutoya.) “Still Be Here” “traces the dynamics at play between fans, corporations and social desires,” according to the CTM website. It takes place on February 5 and 6.

After its CTM premiere, “Still Be Here” will be performed at Austria’s Donaufestival and London’s Barbican.

CTM’s description of “Still Be Here” reads:

“Still Be Here” explores Hatsune Miku as the crystallisation of collective desires, embodied in the form of a teal-haired virtual idol, forever 16. In watching the deconstruction of this perfect star, the audience comes to the uncanny realisation that Miku is simply an empty vessel onto which we project our own various fantasies. In this void, the topology of desire within a networked community becomes tangible and Miku becomes an allegory of the commodified female body as governed by corporate regulation and normative social etiquette. The performance critically deconstructs this body and speculates on opportunities to transgress it through means of appropriation. 

Read Patrick St. Michel’s look at whether Miku can break in the U.S., and read our 2012 interview with Laurel Halo.

Watch Miku perform “Glass Wall” in New York:

Watch Laurel Halo perform “Light And Space” for Pitchfork.tv:

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