Matter.exe: A Materialist Reading of Virtual Influencers
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2025-08-15
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en
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This thesis examines how virtual influencers, exemplified by posterchild and case
study Lil Miquela, relate to their audience, environment and overall becoming as matter. The
problem addressed within this thesis is the prevailing tendency to frame virtual influencers as
simulated imitations of humans, and therefore ‘unreal’, which obscures their active
participation in the material-discursive production of reality. Drawing on Karen Barad’s
agential realism, supported by Bruno Latour and Legacy Russel, the study centralizes the
objective of rethinking virtual subjectivity through a materialist lens. Methodologically, this
thesis utilizes a multimodal analysis to trace Miquela’s intra-actions in both domestic (vlogs)
and commercial (music, brand campaigns) contexts, thereby tending to visual, auditory, and
lexical registers. Findings reveal that Miquela’s—and by extension, the virtual influencer’s—
identity emerges not as a fixed given that emulates reality, but as an ongoing materialdiscursive
doing that is constituted through intra-actions with viewers, digital infrastructure,
capital flows and other (bodily) assemblages, in turn co-constituting these facets. This reading
dissolves representational hierarchies between virtual and nonvirtual subjects, with
implications for how we understand agency, authenticity and the shared responsibility in
shaping (digital) realities.
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