[1] Keisuke Yamada, “Thoughts on Convergence and Divergence in Vocaloid Culture (and Beyond),” Ethnomusicology Review (blog), February 27, 2017, “Divergence in the Contemporary Moment,” para. 2.

[2] Tom Faber, “Review: Still Be Here Featuring Laurel Halo at The Barbican,” Resident Advisor, January 3, 2017, para. 4.

[3] Faber, para. 3.

[4] LaTurbo Avedon, “Still Be Here - Hatsune Miku,” LaTurbo Avedon (blog), para. 4, accessed July 19, 2017.

[5] Jussi Parikka, “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2012): 97.

[6] Jean-Luc Choplin, “Preface,” in THE END Liner Notes (Sony Music Entertainment Japan, 2013), 1.

[7] Kazunao Abe, “Introduction,” in ATAK 020 THE END (Sony Music Entertainment Japan, 2013), backcover; Fuji TV Official, “THE END” Hatsune Miku x Keiichiro Shibuya VOCALOID OPERA, 2013.

[8] Choplin, “Preface.”

[9] Master Blaster, “Hatsune Miku Stars in Humanless Opera ‘THE END’, It Ain’t Over ‘Till the Incredibly Skinny Vocaloid Sings,” RocketNews24, November 22, 2012, para. 7.

[10] In 2014, Peter Gelb, director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, said that an opera is “a kind of dinosaur doomed to extinction” (Terry Teachout, “The Future of Opera,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2014, sec. Life and Style, para. 1).

[11] Atsushi Kodera, “Composer Shibuya Tests Limits of Music,” The Japan Times Online, March 2, 2014, para. 18.

[12] Kodera, para. 13.

[13] Kodera, para. 12.

[14] Andrew Taylor, “‘What Is Death?’ How Tragedy Inspired a Japanese Composer’s Virtual Opera,” Financial Review, September 6, 2017, para. 1.

[15] 39CH MIKU channel, 【VOCALOID OPERA】 “THE END” Artist Interview 【渋谷慶一郎・初音ミク】, YouTube video, 2013.

[16] The name Hatsune Miku, written 初 (hatsu), “first”; 音 (ne), “sound”; and ミク (miku, an alternative reading of 未来, mirai), “future,” means “First Sound of Future.”

[17] Toshiki Okada, “THE END SCRIPT,” in ATAK 020 THE END (Sony Music Entertainment Japan, 2013), “02. Miku and Animal (Recitative).”

[18] Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects Are Viscous,” Ecology Without Nature (blog), October 25, 2010, 32.

[19] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 173.

[20] Abe, “Introduction.”

[21] Keiichiro Shibuya, “THE END” complete liner notes Keiichiro Shibuya and Masato Matsumura, interview by Masato Matsumura, THE END Liner Notes (book), 2013, “I Have To Take Care of You.”

[22] Parikka, “Medianatures,” 97.

[23] 39CH MIKU channel, “THE END” Artist Interview.

[24] Okada, “THE END SCRIPT,” 01. I Have to Take Care of You (Recitative)".

[25] Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), xiv.

[26] Susan Signe Morrison, The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 80.

[27] “[VOCALOID Opera] THE END [English Subtitles] - Comments,” YouTube comment, accessed January 10, 2017.

[28] AnDroidV, “[VOCALOID Opera] THE END [English Subtitles] - Comments,” YouTube comment, 2016.

[29] NekoShey, “[VOCALOID Opera] THE END [English Subtitles] - Comments,” YouTube comment, 2015.

[30] Morton, Hyperobjects, 137.

[31] Morton, 94.

[32] Marco Pellitteri, The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination: A European Perspective (John Libbey Publishing, 2011), 80.

[33] Okada, “THE END SCRIPT,” “02. Because I am Imperfect (Arioso).”

[34] Brian House, “Machine Listening: WaveNet, Media Materialism, and Rhythmanalysis,” APRJA - A Peer Review Journal About Machine Research (2017): 5.

Most Vocaloid productions keep with the standard formats of pop songs and music videos, played by pop singers at pop concerts. But recently, authors from outside “traditional” fandom circles have demonstrated that Vocaloids, such as the crowd-sourced virtual idol Hatsune Miku can be used just as successfully in “high art” contexts. Such instances include Tara Knight’s Mikumentary series, installed at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum in 2013. [Video 1] Or Tamawari Hiroshi’s Vocaloid Opera AOI with Bunraku Puppets (2014), “a 30 minute-long opera film… in which the Vocaloid singing synthesizer technology is used for the music in the play, and all the actresses are bunraku puppets.”[1] [Video 2] On a different, poppier note, the American chiptune‑inspired band Anamanaguchi launched their track “Miku” in 2016. [Video 3]

Another example is Still Be Here (2016), an hour-long media performance and installation featuring Hatsune Miku, commissioned by the Transmediale/CTM Festival and first presented at the prestigious Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. [Video 4] Initiated and conceptualized by artist Mari Matsutoya in collaboration with electronic musician Laurel Halo, choreographer and visual artist Darren Johnston, virtual artist LaTurbo Avedon, and digital artist Martin Sulzer, Still Be Here is a haunting multimedia performance of great beauty and conceptual depth. Halo provides live sound processing and a minimalistic score made of “gentle pads, insectoid chittering and industrial clanks.”[2] In turn, Miku rendered holographic much like the official shows by Crypton Future Media (Miku’s mother company), performs evocative, uncanny dance moves, hardly shifting from the same center-stage spot. Her twin tails move about and bend unnaturally, as if they were extra limbs. Accompanying Miku’s performance, there is a giant video triptych displaying various visuals, from austere 3D virtual environments to documentary interludes featuring interviews with fans, developers, and academics.[3] Towards the end, Miku sings two ethereal songs with elegiac melodies, whose lyrics were collected and randomized from fifteen Vocaloid hit songs.[4] These songs, “As You Wish” and “Until I Make U Smile,” are available on Still Be Here’s YouTube account to be watched as 360° videos on mobile devices and tablets. [Video 5a, b] Still Be Here’s experimentalism, collaborative ethos, and mixing of different media, genres, and expressions is a textbook example of Miku’s capacity to explore the “weird materialities”[5] emerging from human-nonhuman interaction.

Among the “high art” uses of Hatsune Miku and Vocaloid technology, THE END, a multimedia spectacle created by Japanese musician and composer Shibuya Keiichiro (b. 1973), remains the larger-scale project. [Video 6] Promoted as “the first humanless opera,” THE END was commissioned by the Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media and first performed at that venue in December of 2012. Since then, it has traveled to other locations in both Japan and Europe, such as Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, Germany, and Denmark, receiving wide critical acclaim and even being called “the first performance of the third millennium”[6] by Jean-Luc Choplin, director of the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, that hosted THE END in October 2013. THE END is a crossover between the Western operatic tradition and Japanese popular culture, with Miku staring as the leading lady and all arias and recitatives performed using the Crypton’s VOCALOID software Hatsune Miku and Kagamine Len. During the performance, Shibuya, half-hidden within a translucent compartment, is the only person on the stage occupied by four overlapping giant screens, onto which seven high-resolution devices project THE END’s existential film on the meaning of “death” and “end” for humans and virtual entities alike.[7] [Figure 1]

In addition to Shibuya, the production results from a collaborative “dream team” including the libretto by playwriter and novelist Okada Toshiki, an iconic writer of Japan’s recessionary “lost decade” (ushinawareta jūnen), and visuals and co-direction by the celebrated graphic designer YKBX (Yokobe Masaki). [Figure 2] They were joined by a large team of specialized creators from various fields: architect Shigematsu Shohei, known for his conceptual projects and collaborations with artists such as Marina Abramovic and Kanye West, did the stage design; sound artist and electronic musician Evala, was in charge of the sound design; Pinocchio‑P, a Vocaloid producer originating from the Japanese video sharing website Niconico, took care of the VOCALOID programming; A4A Inc., a digital production agency specializing in transdisciplinary art projects, produced the show.[8] Finally, the most talked-about contribution was eight costumes by Marc Jacobs, at the time artistic director of Louis Vuitton, using the brand’s trademark Damier pattern to evoke enlarged pixels.[9] [Figure 3] The result of this collaboration among heavyweights in their respective creative areas was brilliant: a uniquely immersive, hauntological experience, in which Miku is displaced from the familiar narrative of Japanese aidoru and plunged head-first into an uncanny valley of surreal beauty.

It is ironic that Choplin’s words about “the first performance of the third millennium” concern an art form—the opera—whose sustainability in twenty-first-century concert halls has preoccupied all parties involved in its production and dissemination.[10] For Shibuya, the label “opera” is a deliberate provocation, allowing THE END to play in a broader art-historical and geographical arena, beyond the restrictive categorization of a new media performance by a Japanese composer.[11] In the genealogy of the medium, THE END should be classified as a “post-opera,” sharing affinities with radical proposals like Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett’s anti-opera Neither (1977) or Robert Ashley’s television operas Music with Roots in the Aether and Perfect Lives from the late 1970s. However, unlike these experimental approaches to opera, THE END maintains the classic “structure used by Mozart and Wagner”[12] consisting of arias, recitatives, opening, and climax, as well as its iconic mode, the tragedy,[13] inspired by the death of Shibuya’s wife Maria, in 2008.[14] Shibuya goes as far as to assert that “I thought it was fitting to deal with death... using a medium as a coffin,”[15] reiterating his deliberate mobilization of the opera as a “dead” or anachronistic art form, contrasting with Miku’s futuristic image as the “first sound of the future.”[16]

THE END features an additional two co-stars: the Animal (Dōbutsu) and the Visitor (Houmonsha). [Figure 4] The Animal resembles a large stuffed mouse toy, similar to popular kawaii children’s mascots like Pokémon or Studio Ghibli’s Totoro. The Visitor, in turn, is Miku’s grotesque doppelganger, who takes on different configurations during the show. These range from an imperfect copy of Miku—somewhat akin to Ellen Ripley’s failed clones in Alien Resurrection—to a Cthulhuesque monster made of large eyes and mouths, with long strands of greenish hair undulating like tentacles. [Figure 5] Miku's existentialist conversations with the Animal and the Visitor are a significant part of the plot, which initially unfolds in an austere grey compartment with only a sofa and a lamp. In the first recitative, “Miku and Animal” (Miku to dōbutsu), Miku levitates in the center of the room, while the Animal paces around the stage. A forward tracking shot runs over dunes, stylized buildings and factories, and Miku’s large reclining body. It penetrates her nostrils, in an endoscopic view revealing a palpitating and carnal interior. [Figure 6]

The first words are spoken by the Animal, telling us that “Light falls on an object/ and it comes into existence/ Everything is like this/ Especially us.”[17]These words are important. As philosopher Timothy Morton puts it, “light itself is the most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed… a luminous honey that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us.”[18] By inserting Miku and the other characters into an immersive milieu, intimate and vital despite its obvious digitality, THE END tackles with this “weird sensual space in which everything is entangled.”[19] Even Miku’s interiors are not hologrammatic “bodies without organs” but represented as pulsating flesh. As such, THE END’s first words and images run counter the implied sense of dematerialization that the expression “humanless” suggests, prompting the viewer to readjust their expectations, to consider that virtual beings come into existence within the same physical, rich environment in which humans exist.

This aspect is already embedded within THE END’s staging devices from the start. For instance, Shigematsu’s stage design, whose projection screen unfolds into a three-dimensional object with depth and layers, allows for the film’s complex visual interplay of scales, colors, textures, and planes. Also, the “electronic fortress”[20] created by Shibuya’s music, combined with Evala’s sound programming for a 10.2 surround sound system. Or even the simultaneous translation from Japanese to English performed by a female text‑to‑speech voice during the dialogues,[21] which Shibuya integrated as part of the music, highlighting the physicality of the language ​​and the processes of translation. Loops, static, cross-conversations, and sentences erased or corrected on screen undermine Miku’s dialogs with the Animal and the Visitor, demonstrating the irreducibility of words to their meaning, so often corrupted by human and mechanical errors. Thus, in THE END, the apparent emptying of the stage, devoid of human singers and actors, emphasizes other physical dimensions that reinforce and resonate with each other, capturing those ephemeral “weird materialities”[22] that Miku embodies on the threshold of the organic and inorganic, real and virtual, original and the derivative. The materiality of digital matters is also present in the 3D models of Miku, the Animal, and the Visitor used in THE END, agitated by rebellious shapes, fleshy patches, and irregular shadows, dipped in greyish contemplative lightning which contrasts with explosions of luminous and chromatic intensity at critical moments in the story. This environment differs radically from the smooth and glossy textures commonly found in Crypton Future Media’s concerts, whose 3D models draw on Sega’s Project DIVA videogame series. The message is that THE END’s Miku is not the same as Crypton’s universal, consensual Miku, meant to promote an anonymous consumer crowd.

THE END abides by the aesthetics of excess and digital error: flashing lights, static, glitches, overlapping images. [Figure 7] It insists on the thickness of virtual bodies revealed by that “luminous honey” in the form of LED screens of personal computers, hologrammatic apparitions on stage, or others. Precisely because Miku disrupts our anthropocentric notions of materiality, THE END’s co-director YKBX decided to insert movements “that no real human, only a computer can do,”[23] like levitate, fly, duplicate, or shatter into pieces. This aspect of nonhumanity is mainly encapsulated by the Visitor, who is a deconstructed parody of Miku, threatening her self-image and mental stability by questioning her on difficult topics like death and imperfection. At one point, the Animal even refers to the Visitor as “That woman… who tries to look like you but failed” and that “said something to you / That you did not need to know.”[24] The Visitor is to Miku what Miku is to humans: for instance, in “What’d You Come Here For?” (Nani shi ni kita no), Miku accuses the Visitor of being unnatural and dieting to imitate her, thus replicating the accusations often directed at Miku herself by critics of her normative and commodified female body. The Visitor, however, is not Miku’s only doppelganger or copy in THE END. In “Aria for Death” (Shi no Aria), Miku sinks and drowns in an ocean filled with inanimate and shattered clones of herself, floating around her like dismembered dolls. [Figure 8] The Visitor, as well as these lifeless replicas, seem to index different stages of Miku’s material existence, from “tabula rasa” (a synthetic voice and a corporate image) to uncanny hybridizations with humans, and her potential “deaths.” Indeed, near THE END’s conclusion, the Visitor merges with Miku, originating a single body, meaning that, from the beginning, Miku and her grotesque mockery were not separate entities but more like points in a continuum, amalgamated and combined to form an endless array of liminal objects.

The social upheaval which takes place off-camera also reflects Miku’s psychological and emotional malaise. On various occasions, the Animal comments on the passing of helicopters and exalted speeches in the distance, or the fact that their city is without garbage collection and crows are everywhere. In “The Gas Mask and the Gas” (Gazu masuku to gas), Miku floats around aimlessly in a yellowish mist wearing a gas mask, as if the air was made unbreathable by the collapse of the social structures around her, or her own mental breakdown. [Figure 9] An abstract, unpinpointable “cultural-ecological catastrophe”[25] seems to haunt her virtual reality. Considering that it is “the separation of garbage [that] makes culture possible,”[26] its accumulation suggests a pessimistic view on the salubrity of our twenty-first-century media cultures and societies.

Furthermore, the presence of crows links this toxic atmosphere to the miasmatic vapors of death that stick to the characters. For instance, the Visitor comments that, unlike Miku, humans have a smell, and that the most potent odor they ooze is the stench of their corpses decomposing after they die. At the climax “Because I am Imperfect” (Watashi ga fukanzen da kara), the Animal “eats” Miku originating the Superanimal, a hybrid dragon-like creature with Miku’s face running in front of a gigantic burning sun and dancing amid a shower of comets, or bombs, in a virtual world in disintegration. [Figure 10] The camera shots vary in distance and dynamism, from far-off visions to the tumbling proximity of a GoPro camera, following the Superanimal’s labyrinthic flight. In the end, the Superanimal mutates into what could be a monster out of a horror videogame, in which Miku and the Animal merge with the dragon’s lower and upper jaws, like a monstrous Frankenstein’s creature. Like Frankenstein’s creature, this monster is not evil, but a materialization of Miku’s radically “othered” forms that sometimes come off as disturbing due to their uncanniness to human senses.

In the case of THE END, Miku’s “weird materialities” extend to its complex conditions of reception as an experimental artwork produced by professionals in the context of a pop-cultural subculture run by amateurs. On the one hand, THE END was covered by Miku’s official YouTube channel, presenting trailers and extensive artist interviews. On the other, a great deal of the comments on THE END’s recordings include perplexed Vocaloid fans expressing their confusion, or alluding to the show’s unsettling aesthetic (as one fan puts it, “It's doesn't compare with others Vocaloid events... It's difficult and dark... and rest is colorful and happy...”[27]). Regardless, and despite the occasional negative comment, most fans have responded positively to THE END, even when expressing their bewilderment. Some write that “I didn't understand, but IT WAS AMAZAIN!!!!”[28] or that “This is unsettling in a really beautiful way...”[29] There is even fan art and cosplay of THE END’s Miku appearing online, along with checkerboard cosplay costumes for sale that, due to the show’s specificity, are simultaneously hobby items and Louis Vuitton knock-offs. [Figure 11, 12a, b] This considerable potential for overlapping “high art” and pop mass culture, along with their audiences, is Miku’s viciousness in action, bringing people together independently of their gender, class, or education.

The fact that Shibuya and Miku go on stage together after the performance is over, bowing to thank the audience in synch—Shibuya in person, Miku on the screen—reinforces THE END’s co-constitutive nature. [Figure 13] They are also both enthusiastically applauded, emphasizing Miku’s agency and co-responsibility in THE END beyond simplistic notions of her as a passive receptacle for unilateral fan fantasies. It also disavows the moral panic that Vocaloids (or other “oids”) will substitute humans that often arises in this context (see, for example, two episodes from Fine Brothers’ React series on YouTube, “KIDS REACT to Hatsune Miku” and “Elders React to Vocaloids!”). While Miku is dependent on the continued use of her voice and image by the fans, she still arouses in both children and adults the threat that artificial intelligence will eventually replace us. Miku’s prophetic name, the “first sound of the future,” discloses that very “uncanny futurality of nonhumans” [30] that, as Morton suggests, makes humans aware of the possibility of a future without them.[31]

But THE END brings Miku back from the “dehumanized and superhumanized, abstract and inanimate”[32] realm of immortal characters and voices to the vulnerable precarity of the digital and its technologies—not dematerialized but sensual in their own ways, and perishable like us. As Miku tells her audience during the performance, “I can speak at much faster speeds than this/ because I never get out of breath/ but without words to say next/ With no set words to speak next/ I’d grind to a stop like just now.”[33] In other words, if fannish activities were to stop, Miku would “die” by obsolescence; there would be no more words for her to speak or feelings to express. By enveloping Miku, the Animal, and the Visitor in the intensities of the operatic and tragic, dipping them in aqueous fluids, toxic gases, visceral interiors, and cosmic arenas of war or natural destruction, THE END reflects on the human condition not as separate but as implicated in a “web of material—and often warm-blooded—relations the technical is situated within.”[34] Their bodies, subject to an extensive repertoire of mutations and impossible movements, echo the way in which THE END’s stage and its sonic implementation emphasize the physicality of the screen and music. They resonate carnally with the flashes, glitches, overlaps, and irregularities that animate THE END’s vital aesthetics of digitality. Miku is represented as an imperfect, shifting entity that, far from being an agency-less vessel, serves as an ambassador for the more or less tangible material flows of sound, light, relationality, interstitiality, and affectivity intertwined in our increasingly “weird” technological culture.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Gesamptcutewerk & Nothing That’s Really There.

See in PORTFOLIO – Revolutionary Girl Hatsune Miku.

REFERENCES in END, THE.