Still Image Award Winner 2021

Sylvia - Ziv Schneider (United States)

Artwork Description

Instagram is full of wannabes, but there was only one Sylvia” (Variety) Co-written with AI, Sylvia is a storytelling experiment that disrupted the virtual influencer landscape. Unlike most of her virtual peers, who are designed to appear young forever, Sylvia was designed to age rapidly. The project was posted to Instagram as @myfriendsylvia from July to November 2020, and featured images of Sylvia as she aged five decades, from 30 to 80 years-old. The project challenged conventions around the design of virtual humans; including aging and death to the design process.

The project name, Sylvia, was born from Silver Virtual Influencer, the internal project name in its initial development stages. Silver is not only a reference to the elderly whose hair follicles have lost pigment cells, but also a gradient, a transition, a non binary. As in real life, no one lives forever, so the decision to age Sylvia rapidly led to her inevitable death at the end of the project. The announcement of her passing, after five months of life online, created waves of grief from Sylvia’s loyal followers. The piece, a therapeutic performance of aging and dying, facilitates a deep connection to our fears and vulnerable regions of the human experience.

Partners and collaborators

Supported by The Brown Institute for Media Innovation. The project was part of the IDFA DocLab R&D program 2020 in collaboration with the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Styling and Art Direction: Odie Senesh Character Artist: Halime Maloof Celebration Director: Bethany Tabor Natural Language Processing: Alex Calderwood Digital Installation Design & Development: Tong Wu Music: Philippe Lambert Aging Researcher: Alexa Fleet