alex calderwood

Sylvia

art code

An image of a virtual influencer, Sylvia.

Sylvia is a research project that explores the idea of building aging into the design process of virtual beings. Sylvia’s Instagram account was live from July 2020 as she aged rapidly, before her departure in November 2020. The project was an early exploration of the co-writing paradigm in which prompting an AI persona (trained on hundreds of thousands of Instagram influencer’s posts) led to a coproduced longform text. The text is a jarring mashup of voices that represents a clash between young and old, permanent and impermanent, introspection and pure exterior.