Hatsune Miku is a Japanese virtual idol and an avatar for VOCALOID, a cutting-edge voice synthesizer. Since released in 2007, Miku became a hub for massive collaboration among various types of amateur creators, relying on feedback operations among software network and stage. Her repertoire, almost entirely generated by fans, manifests in an array of multimedia formats, from individually used applications to holographic “live” concerts. Miku’s phenomenon raises important questions concerning alternative modes of authorship and spectatorship in our contemporary mediasphere, presenting a challenge to anthropocentric views on human intentionality and materiality. Timothy Morton’s concept of “hyperobject” can help us make sense of the dissonant relationship between Miku’s stereotypically corporate femininity and the deep mediatic time emanating from her massively distributed collection of objects, affects, and flows. Albeit counterintuitively, Miku’s “weird materialities” resonate with the political project of new materialist feminist epistemologies.

Introduction

With a visionary name announcing the “first sound of the future,” Hatsune Miku (hatsu, “first”; ne, “sound”; miku, an alternative reading mirai, “future”) is a virtual idol hailing from Japan who has become a worldwide phenomenon. She is the most popular mascot of Yamaha’s software Vocaloid (vocal + android), a text-to-speech voice synthesizer that uses recorded phonemes by human speakers[1] to create “vocal fonts.” By entering syllables into an editor, allocating them musical notes, and modulating the voice through options like “timing, dynamics, vibrato, breaths, and vocal stops,”[2] Vocaloid end users can generate realistic singing clips. In short, Vocaloids are editable singers.[3] Initially, Vocaloids were used as background voices for professional music production.[4] L♀LA and LE♂N, the two first Vocaloids to hit the market on January 2004 via the British company Zero-G Limited, were represented as generic human mouths, one female, one male[5]; [Figure 1] while Zero-G Limited’s MIRIAM, a Vocaloid with the voice of pop singer Miriam Stockley launched in July, featured her realistic picture on the cover.[6] The first Japanese Vocaloid, MEIKO, was introduced in November by Crypton Future Media (henceforth, Crypton), a company based in Sapporo.[7] For MEIKO’s box art illustration, Crypton’s developers decided to go with an anime‑style girl instead of faceless mouths or realistic portraits. MEIKO was well received by consumers,[8] encouraging the company to invest in characters. Although Crypton’s first male Vocaloid, KAITO, was a commercial failure,[9] his design foreshadowed the sci-fi flavor that came to characterize many Vocaloids developed by Crypton and other companies from that point on. [Figure 2]

It was not until August 31, 2007, and the seventh (third Japanese) VOCALOID, that the Miku revolution took place. The first VOCALOID Character Vocal Series, Hatsune Miku was more than a character printed on a package. She was an avatar with her own story, a 16-year-old “android diva in the near-future world where songs are lost,”[10] complete with detailed profile information concerning physical, technical, and symbolic characteristics.[11] Miku’s commercial success was immediate, unexpected, and unprecedented, so much so that Crypton was unable to keep up with the impossible demand for her software.[12] Miku had moved beyond her original target audience of professional musicians to win over a crowd of amateur “produsers”—“users turned creators and distributors of content,”[13] mostly anime-obsessed otaku backed by decades’ worth of self-publishing (dōjin) fan culture with a high tolerance for copyright infringement.[14]1 Despite her uncanny resemblance to William Gibson’s Rei Toei, from his novel Idoru (1996), Miku has less to do with futuristic prospects of technological singularity than with the renegotiations of the roles of author, work, and fan in present-day “participatory culture” and “spreadable media.”[15]

This paper draws on a rapidly growing scholarship on Miku[16] to investigate Miku’s “weird materialities”[17] and appearance on screen(s). Miku poses a unique challenge from a feminist media perspective. On the one hand, she adheres to commodified stereotypical femininity, tapping into “various traits related to manga and anime characters… defined as desirable by otaku”[18]—what Hiroki Azuma calls kyara-moé (“character consumption”). On the other, the Vocaloid ecosystem fundamentally differs from fandoms centered on the work of an individual or corporate author, which remain separated from fans by its centralized authority. I suggest that Timothy Morton’s concept of massively distributed “hyperobjects” can help us make sense of the weirdness and messiness of the worlds unfolding from Miku, hardly rivaled in contemporary media culture. With no original or dominant work, Miku’s promise of an equal public sphere, however unrealized in practice, resonates deeply with the political project of new materialist feminist epistemologies,[19] challenging normative notions of authorship and anthropocentric materialities.

Miku as screen, network, stage

Unlike her predecessors, Miku became a full-fledged “affective technology”[20] by appealing to otaku audiences through her moé style. Moé is a complex term denoting both a strong empathy or love for fictional characters[21] promoting their excessive consumption (kyara-moé) and a specific type of cute animanga (anime + manga) caricature, usually “little sister” or “daughter” characters for which one can cheer. For Miku’s voice, Crypton cast Saki Fujita, an anime voice actress with a “natural Lolita voice,”[22] her high-pitched youthfulness differing from the more soul and mature trend of previous female Vocaloids. For Miku’s image, they commissioned KEI, a competent moé illustrator, to create a character whose contemporary sensibility contrasted with MEIKO’s plainness. [Figure 3] Miku’s design features two long twin tails and headgear à la Sailor Moon of the digital age, making her instantly recognizable and easy to draw and adapt.[23] Plus, a sci-fi flavored Japanese school uniform-cum-lolita outfit and moé-fitting silhouette proportions (one early Vocaloid hit song, CosMo’s “The Rampage of Hatsune Miku,” describes these characteristics as hoppeta punipuni, tsurupeta, “soft cheeks, flat breasts”). Miku’s getup retains the black-teal color scheme of Yamaha synthesizers, including details which directly evoke her graphical user interface (GUI): wireless headset microphone, sound meters rendered as colorful light tabs on her skirt and sleeves, black piano keys as tie bars, “VOCALOID” name tag, and a tattoo with her character number (“01”) and name. [Figure 4]

Miku first went viral on Niconico (formerly Nico Nico Douga), a Japanese media-sharing platform similar to YouTube in many ways, with a distinctive feature: it allows comments to be embedded directly onto the video feed, enhancing the impression of a shared viewing experience by making the diachronic appear synchronic.[24] The interactiveness of Niconico’s comment system, along with the website’s high picture quality and leniency towards copyright infringement and sexual content, has captivated the otaku with high levels of technology literacy and familiarity with self-publishing fan culture, explaining why its members spend twice the time there than the average user does on YouTube.[25] One cannot overstate the co-evolution of Niconico and Vocaloids, as they have closely influenced each other’s development, distribution, and popularization. In fact, Niconico presently features a category dedicated exclusively to Vocaloid contents, “BOCANICO.”

Soon after Miku’s release, Niconico users started to upload thousands of music videos made with her software.[26] As noted by Alex Leavitt, Tara Knight, and Alex Yoshiba, “early songs appeared with title cue cards, short animated sequences, lyrics, or static images of Miku,”[27] with few exceptions by savvy users posting videos using various 3D software. MikuMikuDance (MMD), a freeware created by independent developer Higuchi Yu, overcame this limitation, allowing fans without knowledge of 3D animation to choreograph videos featuring Miku and other characters with relative ease. MMD brought about a democratization of 3D within the Vocaloid community, powered by the sharing of resources, numerous upgrades, and contests like the MMD Cup on Niconico. Sega’s launch of Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA in 2009, a series of three-dimensional rhythm videogames featuring Miku and other Vocaloids, reinforced this trend. Project DIVA also includes an Edit Mode, allowing players to create their personalized music videos from predefined modules and parameters.[28] The game became so popular that when searching for Vocaloid songs on YouTube, many top search results are Project DIVA clips, on par with or surpassing the original music videos.

At the same time, 2D videos continued to prosper with various degrees of sophistication, from static images to anime‑like sequences, commonly created with digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing applications like Adobe After Effects or AviUtl. Japanese online communities like Pixiv (similar to DeviantArt) have amassed vast archives of (mainly digital) Vocaloid fanart. While songs, illustrations, and videos are usually perceived as “first-degree” works, the diversity of Vocaloid-related audiovisual formats far exceeds them. On Niconico, “second degree” works include human singers or instrumentalists performing Vocaloid songs, illustrators’ “drawn covers” of music videos, original dance covers, and alternative music videos; “third degree” works include translator-singers covering songs in foreign languages, alternative song arrangements by singers, bands’ live or recorded performances of Vocaloid songs, derivative dance covers, and MMD dance covers.[29] One could add an array of other practices, such as cosplay, cosplay photography, or editing songs and videos into mixtapes and playlists.

Many Vocaloid music videos result from the collaboration of different types of creators, mainly amateurs linked through virtual networking, including composers, lyricists, illustrators, 3D animators, directors, and editors.[30] New works often include hyperlinks to videos from which sounds, images, or other contents were cited.[31] For instance, as demonstrated by Hamasaki Masahiro, Takeda Hideaki, and Nishimura Takuichi, at the time of their study, the music videos “Miku Miku ni Shite Ageru♪” and “Ievan Polkka” became focal points in a creative network of over 2000 creators and 4000 relations between them.[32] Furthermore, their research revealed that “different categories of creators have different roles in evolving the network.”[33] In general, more time‑ and resource-consuming endeavors like songs and music videos are fewer in number but trigger a great deal of speedier creative activities, such as fan illustrations.[34] Songwriters tend to function as “key persons” in centered creative clusters, although sometimes illustrators take over this role, or there is no crucial person altogether, generating decentered clusters.[35]

Groups like Supercell reproduce this modus operandi on a smaller scale. Supercell is a collective of 11 members led by composer and lyrist ryo, responsible for many iconic Vocaloid songs like “Melt” and “World Is Mine.” The remaining ten members provide illustrations, animations, design, and photography in album booklets, cases, and music videos, usually inspired by ryo’s creations.[36] In some cases, the illustrations are the “original” source on which songs are based, e.g., “Black★Rock Shooter,” whose character became so popular it spawned its franchise including merchandise releases, a direct-to-video anime film, two videogames, three manga series, and an eight-episode TV series.[37] In this sense, “one-person shows” are a rare (if not impossible) event in the Vocaloid ecosystem. Even when a creator single-handily composes a song, designs characters, and makes a music video, it will be expanded upon by other authors. Such is the case of Deino, a 3D animator and songwriter known as the creator of the robotic‑insectoid Miku derivative, Calne Ca. Calne Ca first appeared in the instrumental song “Machine Muzik” (2009) and has since been featured in non-Deino songs like Kanimiso-P’s “Bacterial Contamination,” as well as become a regular in fanart and cosplay.[38]

 “Derivatives,” i.e., alternative characters based on preexistent Vocaloids,[39] are another prominent feature of this ecosystem. Crypton’s derivatives include corporate partnerships or seasonal variations (“Racing Miku,” “Snow Miku,” “Sakura Miku”). Fan-made derivatives play with visual, personality, gender, genre, or parodic differences that reflect different aspects of the Vocaloid fandom. Crypton has officially “adopted” many fan-made derivatives—male Hatsune Mikuo, evil Zatsune Miku, heavy metal Hagane Miku, tsundere Akita Neru,[40] whiny and untalented Yowane Haku (yowane, “complaints,” haku, “to spit up”), freakish Shiteyan'yo,[41] Deino’s Calne Ca…—striking business deals with their creators to produce merchandise and include them in venues like Project DIVA. Among Miku’s derivatives, Hatchune Miku is perhaps the most well-known representative. Niconico users Otomania and Tamago produced a music video of a comically deformed “child” Hatsune Miku, waving a spring onion to the beat of a Vocaloid cover of “Ievan Polkka,” a Finish folk song sung by the a capella band Loituma. The format was based on the Internet meme “Leekspin” or “Loituma Girl,” a looping animation of a famous female character from the animanga series Bleach.[42] Miku’s “Ievan Polkka” became so popular that the spring onion was officially acknowledged as Miku’s character item, representing participatory culture in its intricate, remixed, and unpredictable ways. [Figure 5, Video 1]

Video 1 “Ievan Polkka” in Hatsune Miku: Project Diva.

While the corporate rhetoric of empowered “prosumers” has been around since the introduction of the Web 2.0, companies have often struggled to accommodate or openly clashed with the audiences’ expectations of control over cultural production and distribution.[43] With Miku, too, the balancing of “individual participation versus collective effort, local Japanese community versus global networked audiences, and fan-generated content versus corporate-controlled branding”[44] is far from the seamlessness continuity that Crypton paints it to be. Still, by assuming the role of stewardship, supporting peer production and artists through royalty payment and enhancing the users’ means of expression, Crypton has gained the general trust of the Vocaloid community. For instance, Crypton has crafted a modified Creative Commons License allowing for non-commercial uses of Miku’s image (PiaPro, short for “Peer Production”)[45]; boosted the culture of Vocaloid derivatives with software extensions like Append, that provided different moods fo Miku’s voice (replaced with Hatsune Miku V3 in 2015), and created PIAPRO, a collaborative website dedicated to Vocaloid, in which users share and remix their music, illustrations, lyrics, and 3D models.[46] Crypton also released Piapro Studio, a digital audio workstation allowing users to use Vocaloids without purchasing the full software, that presently imports non-Crypton Vocaloid voicebanks, supplies virtual instruments, and supports all five VOCALOID languages.[47] Additionally, Crypton owns an independent music label called KARENT, that facilitates Vocaloid producers to sell and distribute their songs in websites like iTunes.[48]

The ultimate example of Crypton’s strategy of support and enhancement is Miku’s “live” concerts, since 2009. In these performances, prerecorded 3D animations of Sega’s models running at high refresh rates are back-projected onto a suspended Dilad screen with special light diffusion characteristics, creating the illusion of images moving across the stage. Miku and other Crypton Vocaloids like Megurine Luka, Kagamine Rin/Len, Meiko, or Kaito sing, dance, and magically appear and disappear in different costumes before a roaring crowd, while flesh and blood guitarists, keyboardists, and drummers play live instruments on the sides. The result is “eversive,” turning the cyberspace inside out to create an augmented or mixed reality where the screen’s rectangular limits become elusive.[49] In the stadium-like arenas of more recent performances, like Magical Mirai (since 2013), the wider holographic screen permits an extensive range of lateral movements that make up for the lack of depth, and is additionally topped and flanked by giant LED displays exhibiting complementary motion graphics, lyrics, or close-ups of Vocaloids, human performers and crowd. Ironically, this sophisticated post-cinematic apparatus tells the familiar narrative of Japanese aidoru—a “canned” Miku waves and talks to the masses, introduces band members, gets emotional over fan support—but stays within the perimeter of “virtual pop stars as vivid, engaging characters, with whom interaction is thus far limited.”[50] Nevertheless, by engendering a ritualized time-place where the dematerialized performer and the community physically meet, Crypton stroke a delicate balance between the company’s branding and the audiences’ je sais bien mais quand-même (following psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni’s famous formulation), i.e., the “meta-pleasure” of those who playfully and intentionally engage with Miku.[51] [Video 2]

Other stage appearances choose to emphasize Miku’s cybernetic nature over a seamless “eversion” into the real world. One example is Niconico ChoParty, a grand-scale event starring Niconico’s users in multiple genres, including Vocaloid performances with a setup akin to Crypton’s concerts (although Vocaloids are rendered in MMD, mirroring the practices of Niconico’s community). In Niconico’s Vocaloid concerts, Miku’s centrality is diluted in favor of an extended Vocaloid cast, including other Crypton Vocaloids, non-Crypton Vocaloids (e.g., Camui Gackpo, Gumi, Otomachi Una, AI, Yuzuki Yukari, v flower…), and popular fan-made voicebanks called Utaloids (e.g., Terto). Moreover, unlike Crypton’s restrained use of supporting CGI graphics—mostly focused on tweaking Miku’s performance “through extremely fast costume changes or transitions that make her body explode into bits and sparkles”[52]—they go all out in this department, making extensive use of dramatic narratives, changing backgrounds, interactions of Vocaloids with digital props and human singers, or even simulating the website’s recognizable comment system on stage with the help of supporting LED displays. The Vocaloids dance in large group choreographies (10+ characters), cover each other’s’ songs and collaborate in elaborate performances that stray from a “simple” concert look to achieve something closer to musical theatre. Unlike Crypton’s emphasis on the anonymous crowd (the only humans on stage being supporting musicians), Niconico’s concerts often feature on-stage appearances by creators. Such performances resonate with and reinforce the motion graphics, visual compositions, and interactive experience found in Vocaloid music videos on Niconico. Miku is still the protagonist but serves the broader agenda of a specific website that does not necessarily endorse Miku as the “default” or “neutral” idol, as promoted by Crypton’s concerts.

A final venue to be considered are small, overseas fan-made gigs using basic structures and “comparatively blocky characters and jerky movements, definite slips into uncanny territory.”[53] Attempting to replicate corporate concerts on tiny budgets, these often use single projectors and mosquito screens as light diffusers, employing software like MMD and AniMiku to render choreographies designed by collaborators, modeled after Project DIVA, or using motion files released by fans on Niconico. Music critic and scholar Thomas Conner has provided an in-depth analysis of the logistics, motivations, and frustrations involved in such enterprises,[54] which raise essential questions concerning the politics of resource distribution, accessibility, and economic authority in the Vocaloid ecosystem.[55] Indeed, the meta-pleasure of such “mosquito net” Vocaloid concerts stems from their underground legitimacy, resulting from “the part-time, after-hours labor of two to three people”[56] as opposed to the high production values and the corporative environment in both Crypton’s and Niconico’s concerts. The fact that Miku looks like a clunky apparition brings them closer to the original amateur spirit of Vocaloid creations.

Miku as hyperobject

The purpose of the previous section was to provide a brief glimpse into the intricacy of Miku’s “weird materialities.”[57] These encompass—but are not limited to—sonicity, electromagnetism, light modulation, hard and software, complex topologies of relationality, affectivity, and interstitiality, semiotic and sub-semiotic elements, author-names, and other quantifiable and unquantifiable aspects, substances, and limits that shape what one may call her “Miku-ness.”[58] Weaved together, these form a profound “relationship of co-responsibility and indebtedness”[59] that holds but also exceeds human intentionality. In other words, songwriters shape Miku’s voice as much she shapes their songs—she owes them as much as they owe her.

Regardless, in the discourse of both critics and fans, Miku’s “body” is often erased, even when the works themselves bring out the full vibrancy of her matters. The notion that Miku is not real or does not exist may result from the fact that the most crucial stereotype concerning women and technology is that “it is men who are in control of technology.”[60] Indeed, Miku is frequently portrayed as a hollow sign or a passive commodity onto which male fans project their fantasies, laced with pernicious gendered and racialized stereotypes about the “submissive Asian woman.” Such interpretations do not consider Miku’s “peculiar and distinctive kind of agency, one that is neither a direct nor incidental outgrowth of human intentionality but rather one with its own impetus and trajectory.”[61] In this sense, one’s relationship to Miku is never unidirectional.

An example of this erasure is the promotional blurb released by the renowned Berliner institution Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) for Still Be Here, an hour-long media performance and installation featuring Miku, initiated and conceptualized by artist Mari Matsutoya, in collaboration with electronic musician Laurel Halo, choreographer Darren Johnston, virtual artist LaTurbo Avedon, and digital artist Martin Sulzer:

Commissioned by the Transmediale/CTM festival and first performed at HKW in 2016,[63] Still Be Here captures Miku’s “weird materialities” with great beauty and depth—haunting melodies, twin tails that move about and bend as if they were extra limbs, a giant video triptych displaying austere virtual environments and documentary interviews with academics, fans, and developers. Nevertheless, HKW’s blurb reduces Miku to “an empty vessel” and “void,” simplistically equating her commodity form to passive femininity. While this does not seem to reflect the thoughts of the artists involved,[64] the blurb entirely disavows Miku’s own agency. It also adopts a “savior” attitude towards the Vocaloid community, suggesting that audiences had not, up to that point, critically engaged with Miku—even though fans have been deconstructing, transgressing, and appropriating Miku ever since Crypton launched her.

The popularity of Miku among female illustrators and cosplayers, and the growing number of Vocaloid producers (“producer” being the term used for Vocaloid songwriters in the community) who are women, also makes it hard to explain away her phenomenon with the otaku’s male gaze. While many Vocaloid producers on Niconico partake in an Internet culture of anonymity and therefore keep their gender private, many well-known producers using Miku and other Vocaloids are women: Kuroda Asin, Seiko-P, Anzu Ame, OSTER project, NicoNya, Miyum-P, Faye-P, Shokkidananohit, Hitoshizuku-P, Chanagi-P, Kanae Fujishiro, Yesi-P, Intro-P, Shinjou-P, Konki-P, Kaoling. Mayuko, 6410, Miako, yurahonya, mucha-P, empath-P, Yuni-P, or JevanniP, among others. Artists, educators, and researchers in Japan and abroad also identify potential in Miku and Vocaloid culture exceeding the limited scope of otaku culture. For instance, the case of a private Japanese all‑girls’ school that introduced VOCALOID classes and invited well‑known female Vocaloid producers to foster creativity in young students.[65] Not only that, but Miku has been added to music curriculums in Japanese universities[66] and is the subject of various chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality since 2016.[67]

The musical style and lyrical content of Miku’s songs are also more complex and varied than often given credit. While many Miku songs are indeed close to typical bubbly aidoru pop, some Vocaloid producers enjoy creating song series with intricate overarching plots, like Shizen no Teki-P’s “Kagerou Project,” or songs dealing with realistic themes, like “Balloon” by Tiara about “the struggle that young girls face growing up”[68] and “Rolling Girl” (wowaka) about bullying. Others, like “Senbonzakura” (Kurousa-P), feature cryptic lyrics about complex themes such as the westernization of Japan during the Meiji Restoration. There is also a cult following of gothic, industrial, and horror Vocaloid songs with dark lyrics such as “Bacterial Contamination” (Kanimiso-P) or songs by Machigerita-P, like “Broken Human Machine,” about prostitution and abortion. Parody songs like “+IMPALE” (rokurin, cilia) are so obscene that they got banned from the Vocaloid wiki for violating its terms of service. Crypton’s excludes overtly violent or sexual songs from their concerts, but the fact that all of these belong to the VOCALOID Hall of Fame (exceeding 100,000 views on Niconico) demonstrates that Miku as “author” can hardly be narrowed down to either one musical style or the heteronormative girlhood of aidoru groups like AKB48. Additionally, Miku’s repertoire includes arthouse projects like Keiichiro Shibuya’s THE END (2012), Hiroshi Tamawari’s VOCALOID Opera AOI with Bunraku Puppets (2014), or Still Be Here, which uncorset Miku from the standard formats of pop songs, pop singers, and pop concerts.

My point is that, more than sex-role stereotypes, Miku’s primary challenge is to anthropocentrism (of authorship, materiality). An excellent example are the two dedicated episodes from the popular React video series on YouTube: “Elders React to Vocaloids!” and “KIDS REACT to Hatsune Miku.” In both cases, seniors and children react to viral videos of Crypton’s “live” concerts, expressing bafflement and confusion over her “unreality.” In “Elders React to Vocaloids!” one participant inquires, “Is that a real artist? I don’t know,” while another exclaims “Wow, they love it! But what the heck is this thing?” In “KIDS REACT to Hatsune Miku,” one girl summarizes many of the participants’ (both old and young) anthropocentric views on materiality. “She’s not real!” the girl exclaims, exasperated. “How can you be a fan of her if she’s not real!?” An older woman, Vera, vividly describes the crux of both episodes: “So there’s nothing really there? And they actually go to a concert to watch nothing that’s really there? The world has gone insane,” she concludes. Vera’s expression “nothing that’s really there” perfectly encapsulates Miku’s “weird materialities.” It also highlights that the element of deep reciprocity that makes Vocaloid “live” concerts unique is mostly invisible or implied in Crypton’s concerts.[69] The real game-changer in such shows is that unlike other “holographic” idols, who preserve the standard dynamics of centralized authorship,  Miku sings user-generated hits, all of which at some point were uploaded and grew popular on Niconico, Piapro or other platforms, before being selected by Crypton from the Vocaloid Hall of Fame. While it is unlikely that concert-goers are ignorant about Vocaloid culture, the popularity of Crypton’s concerts on websites like YouTube increases the likelihood of encounters with unsuspecting viewers, creating a great deal of satire, sensationalism, and flattening of the phenomenon. [Videos 3 & 4]

Scholars from various backgrounds agree that the Vocaloid phenomenon entails going beyond existing paradigms about “person,” “character,” “recording” or “performance,”[70] deploying complex concepts such as Gilles Deleuze’s “body without organs” to address new modes of audience participation and engagement. However, Miku is riddled with poles of organization, stratification, administration, and conflicting interests of production, circulation, and reception.[71] The Vocaloid fandom itself is hugely diverse on every front, with many points of contention arising among fans. As such, I suggest that philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of “hyperobject” (e.g., global warming) may be more productive in understanding Miku’s multifacetedness, particularly, concerning her being what Japanese critics since the 1990s have called a kyara. An abbreviation and transliteration of the English word “character,” the kyara is “a type of very stylized character… an icon with an easily recognizable name that lends itself to the most varied forms of marketing.”[72] The kyara’s body is often aligned with the “cuteness-industrial complex,”[73] designed to enhance their market penetration within the regime of “affective capitalism.”[74] According to Marc Steinberg, the kyara wields an “immaterial force of attraction, and a material propensity for distribution”[75] aligned with Morton’s definition of hyperobjects as entities that “undermine normative ideas of what an ‘object’ is in the first place.”[76]

For Morton, hyperobjects have four primary characteristics: they are “viscous,” “nonlocal,” “phased,” and “interobjective.” Viscous because they “‘stick’ to beings that are involved with them,”[77] and nonlocal because hyperobjects are “massively distributed in time and space”[78] and therefore impossible to grasp with human senses. Miku is particularly good at sticking to humans, at making an impression and compelling them to seek her out and proselytize. When William Gibson tweeted that “Hatsune Miku is clearly a more complex phenomenon than I initially assumed. Requires further study,”[79] he echoed a common reaction among “acafans” (academic fans) who come into contact with her. For instance, Thomas Conner describes his first contact with Miku in a simulcast of a “live” concert as an arresting experience, filling him with insatiable curiosity.[80] Filmmaker and scholar Tara Knight also writes about her documentary series Mikumentary that “these films are both about the Miku community and my contribution to the community,”[81] unseparating herself from Vocaloid fannish activities. Sandra Annett vibrantly recalls her first encounter with Miku as gripping her with a “strange, demanding passion.”[82] Bound by Miku’s viscosity, such research activities are “just” another fan work.

The more you become immersed in Miku’s mediatic milieu, the more she discloses how ungraspable the “real” Miku is. According to Morton, because “any ‘local manifestation’ of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject,”[83] we can only come into contact with “an indexical sign that is metonymy for the hyperobject,”[84] a quality that Morton attributes to “phasing.” Every software, every song, every music video, every illustration, every videogame, every cosplayer, every derivative character, every big data visualization, every hologram, every item of merchandise, manifests Miku’s kyara but also belongs to a group of “objects [that] seem to contain more than themselves,”[85] bringing forth her hyperobjective qualities. And while celebritydom is always virtual to some extent,[86] Miku fundamentally differs from both human celebrities and virtual idols with a limited repertoire created by a few individuals. She is massively distributed in space and time—it is impossible for someone to know every Miku creation. It would be pointless even if they did, as countless more (potentially) appear at every moment of every day.

Miku, as a “multidimensional hyperobject [that] pulses in and out of the limited confines of human perception”[87] thus becomes extremely hard to define. Simple definitions, like Wikipedia’s “a Vocaloid software voicebank developed by Crypton Future Media and its official moé anthropomorph, a 16-year-old girl with long, turquoise twin tails,”[88] fail to account for Miku’s impossibly wide‑range of user-generated content, from songs, videos, and illustrations to art installations and research papers. A look into any of her derivatives is like going down a rabbit hole, each having its constellation of products, producers, and sometimes derivatives of derivatives of derivatives. Miku is big data and diagrams, a social experience, a product of her “Japaneseness” and a global phenomenon. She is entangled in power asymmetries of corporately and peer managed contents, but also unmanageable—or, as Morton puts it “impossible to handle just right,”[89] as every hyperobject is. Not only because of her massive scale and heterogeneity but because genuine participatory culture is always, to some extent chaotic, subversive, or inconvenient.

Moreover, if hyperobjects are not restricted to intersubjectivity but “give us the most vivid glimpse of interobjectivity,”[90] Miku is also unparalleled in her sticking to things, not just to people, highlighting the “ecological interconnectedness”[91] at her core. From viral videos on Niconico and YouTube, to Internet memes like “Loituma Girl” (even stealing the spring onion for herself); from the virtual building blocks of Minecraft—both as statues[92] and protest against the game’s creator anti-LGBT stances[93]—to “real” LEGO plastic bricks[94]; or the myriads of characters from manga, anime, and videogames, converted into MikuMikuDance models for use in other fandoms. As the first crowd-sourced virtual idol, Miku “sticks” to every other Crypton and non-Crypton Vocaloids, who partake in her hyperobjecthood. Her immense and immensely varied repertoire is not only unattainable by “real” (human) artists but determined by the kyara’s nonhumanness. Indeed, if hypothetically one were to substitute Miku’s synthetic voice with her donor’s Saki Fujita, the hyperobject would cease to function: only the kyara’s “dehumanized and superhumanized, abstract and inanimate”[95] voice can accommodate all songs created with her voicebank under the umbrella of “a Hatsune Miku song,” regardless of how radically different their style or origins may be.

The same principle is at work visually. Rather than indulging in unnecessary strokes of authorship, KEI’s design mobilizes the tropes of moé cuteness to create a highly recognizable yet pliable template. One can observe this by way of a quick search for “Hatsune Miku” fanart in the popular imageboard Zerochan. When comparing the results to fanart of more “traditional” animanga or videogame characters, such as One Piece’s Luffy or Tōhō Project’s Reimu Hakurei, despite the artists’ styles, results for Luffy and Reimu are reasonably uniform in terms of proportions, clothes, hair, and eye color. On the contrary, Miku’s depiction by fans is strikingly uneven, varying greatly in style, character design, colors, theme, and settings when compared to “normal” characters. Albeit counterintuitively, Miku’s samenessness[96] of voice and her corporate image, when vastly deployed and manipulated by her fans, disrupts normative understandings of the “materiality of authorship.”[97] Indeed, Miku’s hyperobjective qualities—viscous, massively distributed, interobjective—make her “multiple as such, and not as a collective instance of the singular.”[98]

Kaisa Kurikka, in her analysis of the work and persona of Finnish writer Algot Untola (1868-1918) addresses his female heteronym Maiju Lassila, a superficial 17-year-old girl interested in love, who also happens to be a famous author of idealistic novels traditionally penned by male philosophers. According to Kurikka, Maiju’s character mocks “the notions of literature as patriarchal self-expression.”[99] Miku works like this to some extent, forcing both male and female authors through the apparatus of stereotypical girlhood, a process seldom as straightforward as the single drive to dominate and control a passive commodity. For instance, Supercell’s “World Is Mine” (2008), commonly regarded as Miku’s “anthem” and one of the most popular Vocaloid song ever, has a memorable chorus that goes “sekai de ichiban ohime-sama” (“I’m the number one princess in the world”). While this immediately refers listeners to conventional “pretty pink princess”[100] culture, for songwriter ryo, a twenty or thirtysomething man in Japan, engaging with this kind of sentimental discourse is not without troubles. In an interview for The Japan Times, ryo describes the awkward beginning of his career as a Vocaloid producer, when friends would mock him for writing “feminine” lyrics, and he would think “Why am I writing this kind of stuff?!”[101] Sometimes, this gender play leaves a linguistic footprint, namely, when Miku sings using the Japanese pronoun boku, generally reserved for young men—a trope known in the animanga fandom as bokukko, literally, “boku girl.”

In this sense, ryo’s belief that a teenage girl should sing about cuteness and romance,[102] however regressive in and of itself, was instrumental to Miku becoming an hyperobject. Case in point: Supercell’s first hit song, “Melt,” launched on December 7, 2007, whose centrality to the Vocaloid canon is attested by it serving as the closing song of 10th anniversary Magical Mirai, in 2017. During the first months following Miku’s release, Vocaloid songs were mostly about Miku’s status as a virtual idol, software, and commodity; “Melt,” on the contrary, presented a quintessential scenario of high school animanga romance: sharing an umbrella with one’s crush. While “Melt” is laced with self-reflexive irony,[103] ryo’s de-technologization of Miku by treating her as a “real” sixteen-year-old girl nevertheless had a transformative effect on the Vocaloid ecosystem, allowing it to evolve and grow into a more mainstream sensibility. Whether authors comply or deviate from Miku’s “official” Crypton persona, then, she remains the template about which they are constructed, gain meaning, and are bound together in interobjective relationships. As Kurikka points out, just like Maiju’s stereotypical femininity must be understood in relation to Untola’s several heteronyms “by treating all… author-names as materially connected to each other,”[104] so are Miku’s songs and images “materially connected to each other” through her name—even if the process of heteronymity (one author, many names) is inverse to that of Vocaloid idols (many authors, one name).

Conclusion

The unique nature of Hatsune Miku as an editable, crowd-sourced singer has shaped her as a hub for user-generated and network-based works. It the beginning, there was a voice and an illustration by Crypton Future Media, whose moé traits appealed to otaku self-publishing cultures on Niconico. From here, Miku spread towards a massive collaboration among various types of creators, inhabiting many commercial and noncommercial shapes, from GUI to music videos or illustrations, from 2D to 3D, from original works to derivative characters and (second, third degree). Miku’s stage appearances change according to the organizers’ agenda and audiences. Crypton’s intention is advertising a singing synthesizer, so “holographic” concerts mimic J‑pop shows, emphasizing the anonymous consumer crowd. Niconico’s Vocaloid concerts reiterate individual creativity and the interactive “Niconico experience.” Fan-made Vocaloid gigs, low-quality and inadvertently uncanny, are closer to the DIY ethic of peer production.

All these Mikus prompt us to rethink the dynamics of production, consumption, and diffusion in terms of “disjunctures and incommensurable differences” [105] that evade smooth sailing between the individual and the network, grassroots audiences and corporate control, the localized “molecular” and overarching big data. There is dissonance or duplicity at play here: Miku’s perceived “flatness” as a stereotypically feminine corporate mascot is at odds with the complexity and deep (mediatic) time emanating from her as a massively distributed collection of objects, affects, relationships, and flows. In twenty-first-century otaku culture, nothing but a cute animanga girl with the right combination of moé traits could achieve such “viscosity” and become a hyperobject. This dissonance problematizes the “becoming a woman author [as] a threshold for becoming other”[106] not just in relation to male subjects, but to humanity more broadly. Although all kyara tend toward hyperobjectivity, the fact that unlike “normal” characters from anime, manga, or videogames, Miku has no central author or work at her centre, forces us to engage with a material realm beyond the sovereignty of human matters and scales—“nothing that’s really there”—and reconsider how authorial agency is distributed in the creation of art. In the process, one may come to a deeper understanding that the “human itself is completely nonhuman… as a very dirty, messy and weirdly still functional thing.”[107] Liberating Miku from her gendered commodity form would, therefore, deny the very best she has to offer to a feminist political and intellectual project: her emancipatory challenge to anthropocentric notions of authorship and materiality, increasingly important as we grow more and more entangled with the global technosphere.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – END, THE & Gesamptcutewerk.

See in PORTFOLIO – Revolutionary Girl Hatsune Miku.

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[14] The Comic Market, one of the largest comics conventions, is an otaku event dedicated to fan-made spoofs of commercial anime, manga, and videogames.

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[40] Akita Neru is an officially recognized derivative emerging in reaction to an alleged anti-Miku campaign on Japanese media. Denialists would end their posts on 2channel with phrases like “Akita, neru” (“Enough, going to bed”) or “Neru, omera mo neru yo” (“Going to bed, you should too”). “Akita Neru,” in Vocaloid Wiki, accessed March 3, 2019.

[41] Shiteyan’yo is an officially recognized derivative consisting of Miku’s head with the pigtails serving as legs and feet. Her name comes from the lyrics of “Miku Miku ni Shite Ageru.” “Shiteyan’yo,” Fanloid Wiki, accessed June 19, 2019.

[42] “Leekspin / Loituma Girl,” Know Your Meme, para.1, accessed June 9, 2019.

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[45] Zaborowski, “Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols,” 117.

[46] “Piapro (Piapro),” accessed June 9, 2019.

[47] “Piapro Studio,” Vocaloid Wiki, accessed July 17, 2017.

[48] “KARENT：The World’s Largest VOCALOID Record Label,” KARENT, accessed June 9, 2019.

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[50] Conner, 77.

[51] Conner, 90.

[52] Leavitt, Knight, and Yoshiba, “Producing Hatsune Miku: Concerts, Commercialization and the Politics of Peer Production,” 220.

[53] Conner, “Rei Toei Lives!,” 132.

[54] Conner, 131–36.

[55] Conner, 131–33; Leavitt, Knight, and Yoshiba, “Producing Hatsune Miku: Concerts, Commercialization and the Politics of Peer Production,” 224–26.

[56] Conner, “Rei Toei Lives!,” 133.

[57] Parikka, “Medianatures,” 96.

[58] Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 6–12; Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts (London ; New York: I.B.Tauris, 2013), 5–6.

[59] Barrett and Bolt, Carnal Knowledge, 6.

[60] Liza Tsaliki, “Women and New Technologies,” in The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism, ed. Sarah Gamble (London: Routledge, 2002), 65.

[61] Frost, “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology,” 70.

[62] “Still Be Here,” CTM Festival – Festival for Adventurous Music and Art, February 6, 2016.

[63] Two songs are available on YouTube as 360° videos.

[64] Charlie Robin Jones, “Crowd-Sourced Stardom: Mari Matsutoya and Hatsune Miku,” ssense, September 14, 2017.

[65] Alexis Stephens, “I’m Every Woman: Hatsune Miku, Beyoncé and Digital Girl Power,” MTV Iggy (blog), January 14, 2014, para.14.

[66] Jiji, “Music Educators Tapping Vocaloid,” The Japan Times Online, April 1, 2014, sec. National, para. 3.

[67] Conner, “Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond”; Jackson and Dines, “Vocaloids and Japanese Virtual Vocal Performance: The Cultural Heritage and Technological Futures of Vocal Puppetry”; Zaborowski, “Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols.”

[68] Stephens, “I’m Every Woman,” para. 8.

[69] Leavitt, Knight, and Yoshiba, “Producing Hatsune Miku: Concerts, Commercialization and the Politics of Peer Production,” 215.

[70] Zaborowski, “Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols,” 113.

[71] Leavitt, Knight, and Yoshiba, “Producing Hatsune Miku: Concerts, Commercialization and the Politics of Peer Production,” 212–25; Stina Marie Hasse Jørgensen, Sabrina Vitting-Seerup, and Katrine Wallevik, “Hatsune Miku: An Uncertain Image,” Digital Creativity 28, no. 4 (October 2, 2017): 326–28.

[72] Marco Pellitteri, The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination: A European Perspective (John Libbey Publishing, 2011), 78.

[73] David Ehrlich, “From Kewpies to Minions: A Brief History of Pop Culture Cuteness,” Rolling Stone, July 21, 2015, para.2.

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[75] Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 83.

[76] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 139.

[77] Morton, 1.

[78] Morton, 48.

[79] Mark Oppenneer, “Seeking Hatsune Miku,” Seeking Hatsune Miku, 2011.

[80] “Rei Toei Lives!,” 4.

[81] “Mikumentary,” taraknight.net, 2012, para.1.

[82] Annett, “What Can a Vocaloid Do? The Kyara as Body without Organs,” 163.

[83] Hyperobjects, 1.

[84] 77.

[85] Morton, 78.

[86] Yo Zushi, “Crowd-Sourced Pop Singer Hatsune Miku Reveals the True Nature of Stardom,” NewStatesman, March 20, 2017.

[87] Stephen Muecke, “Global Warming and Other Hyperobjects,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 20, 2014.

[88] “Hatsune Miku,” in Wikipedia, May 28, 2019.

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[96] Zaborowski, “Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols,” 126; Rafal Zaborowski, “Fans Negotiating Performer Personas: ‘Melt’ by Ryo Feat. Hatsune Miku,” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 43, no. 2 (2018): 107.

[97] Kaisa Kurikka, “In The Name of The Author: Towards Materialist Understanding of Literary Authorship,” in Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London ; New York: I.B.Tauris, 2013), 115.

[98] Steven D. Brown, “Michel Serres: The Angelology of Knowledge,” The Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (February 1, 2000): 148.

[99] Kurikka, “In The Name of The Author: Towards Materialist Understanding of Literary Authorship,” 123.

[100] Clara Moskowitz, “The Destructive Culture of Pretty Pink Princesses,” LiveScience, January 24, 2011.

[101] Daniel Robson, “Supercell’s Synthetic Pop Wins Real Fans,” The Japan Times, February 5, 2010, online edition, sec. Music.

[102] Robson, para.12.

[103] Zaborowski, “Fans Negotiating Performer Personas,” 106–7.

[104] “In The Name of The Author: Towards Materialist Understanding of Literary Authorship,” 122–23.

[105] Derek Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” Minnesota Review 83, no. 1 (2014): 135.

[106] Kurikka, “In The Name of The Author: Towards Materialist Understanding of Literary Authorship,” 123.

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