Have you met t-babe? She was a virtual pop star in the year 2000.
From Entertainment Weekly, 2002:
AGE 18
WHY HER After conquering Europe (she had a top 20 single in the U.K. and appeared in the pages of British Vogue and Italian Cosmopolitan), the computer-generated singer will invade our shores via a TV series or feature film. Until then, you can check out the surprisingly cerebral siren at www.t-babe.com
ROLE MODELS Marie Curie, Simone de Beauvoir, and Madonna- for their will to excel, and for showing anticonformity as a means and not as an end.
BEST ADVICE When I was 14, my mum told me 'You were meant to be blonde...'
IF SHE WEREN'T SINGING, SHE'D BE In a library, deconstructing Spinoza's Ethics by day; taking dance and singing lessons at night.
WHO SHOULD PLAY HER IN A MOVIE My dad would say Charlize Theron, but I see Kirsten Dunst or Reese Witherspoon.
Techno-optimists of the Y2k era thought virtual influencers/ cyber babes/ CGI celebs were the future.
"They make the actual pop stars up the ante... Hollywood has to try harder now to manufacture an even more perfect girl"
- A Hollywood Sicko
t-Babe was the ideal woman inasmuch as she was inhuman. A facsimile and a fantasy with the kayfabe of being 'real'.
Her first and only single ‘Peter Pumpkineater’ was released alongside a fundraising appeal organized by the Duchess of York, Prince Andrew's wife.
“Spending hours listening to a variety of styles, from dance and hip hop, to rap and garage, she founded 'cybo'. An eclectic style that has culminated in her first single entitled 'Peter Pumpkineater'.
t-babe's lyrical influences range from a host of 20th century children's rhymes complemented by her real life emotional experiences.”
Description courtesy of t-babe.com
t-babe was mostly a flop. Unsurprising given she was the brainchild of Scottish couple Sascha and Tessa Hartmann who have the Midas bad-touch. Everything they make is a giant piece of shit.
Tessa and Sascha also made Sir Billi, considered one of the worst animated films of all time.
Tessa's dad was a Scottish business magnate and like most uber-rich progeny, she has money to burn on dumb vanity projects. Sir Billi was a decades long dream. Directed by Sascha and written by Tessa. It's bizarre and crudely animated with awful CGI models, anti-humor, and a lot of cartoon animal violence. The plot is nonsene. Antrhopormorphic beavers are being forced out of Scotland. A skateboarding veternarian, Billi, attempts to save a beaver in hiding. I guess? Idk. It's cuckoo.
FUN FACTS
- It cost $19 million to make and earned $15,838.
- It was Sean Connery's last film. It also featured Alan Cumming + other huge talent.
- Regrettably it's Scotland's first computer-animated feature.
Today the Hartmann's are running ai slop brands and art projects using (surprise surprise) ai swimsuit models! Their daughter Tallia Storm is a singer and influencer. T-allia is basically t-babe irl.
Virtual idols like t-babe ushered in the millennium. The first (Kyoko Date) came from Japan in 1996. Most fizzled out fast. One of the more successful was Webbie Tookay (like 'Web 2K' lol).
Webbie was the world’s first virtual supermodel. Reportedly worth $15 million by 2000- or 3x more than the highest paid human model, Gisele.
That's John Casablancas (Julian Casablancas' dad, founder of Elite Model Management, prolific scumbag, etc.)
John was Webbie's creator and biggest advocate. He also personally dictated Webbie's ‘aesthetic parameters’. John said her greatest asset was "she never complains" :-)
Webbie debuted in 1999 when Elite Model Management was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal. John had just fled Elite to create new subsidiary brands including the cyber-model agency, Illusion 2k. Webbie was Illusion's first and only project.
Elite Model Management went bankrupt a few years later. They've since been exposed as a human trafficking nexus with ties to Epstien, Adnan Khashoggi, Trump & other demons.
Knowing Webbie's creators were involved in human trafficking and facing scrutiny before her launch, we gotta wonder: was Webbie a money laundering front? $15 million for Nokia ads seems excessive.
The cyber-babe scheme was exploitative, money laundering or not. A new and extreme commodification of women, a cheapening of personhood. Aughties "pixel vixens" were primitive but prophetic: t-babe walked so Lil Miquela could run.
t-babe and co. were an early attempt to blur the line between reality and replicant, but they didn't inspire existential panic. Webbie was a direct threat to her human counterparts, valued 3x more than the top supermodel. What's so different today? Why does ai feel so much worse? Obvi the distance between virtual and real felt safer back then. You saw early CGI and knew: "That's not human."
Now, ai fakes are indistinguishable from real influencers... but how real is an influencer anyway? How real is a pop star? The ai simulacra appears more human, and sure that's unsettling, but while the simulacra was shaping itself around us, we shaped ourselves around the simulacra. It appears more real, and we appear less so. We've mediated ourselves into oblivion. The image no longer represents reality, it both precedes and produces it.
Basically- virtual idols are the godmothers of all v-tubers and ai influencers. Y2K experiements like these, stupid as they were, were formative to our hyperreality and helped bring us the slop of today. Thank you t-babe!
BIBLIO
BBCNews, 2000 'Cyberbabes: A babe new world'
The Herald, 2001 'Now you're talking t-babe'
NYPost, 2000 'A wave of cyberbabes'
The New Republic, 2001 'Game Over'
AdAge, 1999 'Virtual va va voom'
PCQuest, 1999 'Cyberia's Sexiest'
ABC7 News, 'Webbie Tookay first virtual top model'
Entertainment Weekly, 'Byte Me! 20 hottest women of the web'
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