The New Face of Aria
Min Jee took a deep breath of perfume as it stuck to her skin. She looked down at the script again. The Alchemist’s Nook was the latest in the science-fiction flicks being produced by AmaCo Studios. She had been picked from hundreds for the role of Iona, the last in a future-ancient tribe of star navigators and she had to guide the hero towards his climax.
She preferred to perform in small theaters throughout the small nooks of Taipei, to explore novel characters and real-world problems. These spaces encouraged novelty. She loved to give her monologues, and sometimes wrote her own one-woman plays. The applause was a constant validation for all her hard work. But the ticket sales could hardly pay the rent.
When her profile photo had been flagged by AmaCo to come in and read a script, she thought this was her big break. Soon enough though, her dream had hit a wall.
Today, the culture of Taiwan was stuck in the eternally recycled content factory of Aria. Aria was the country’s mega-star, and despite her death seventy-or-so years ago, her essence had been captured and recreated regularly through flawless deepfakes. Every blockbuster and musical piece was labeled as ‘Aria Rediscovered’ or ‘Aria Eternal’. AmaCo had finally managed to create an infinite money printer by capitalizing on the nostalgia of a society.
The CEO, Bruno DeLeener, usually referred to it as ‘cultural preservation and celebration’. Privately, Min Jee viewed this as a ‘monopoly on creativity’.
Still, it made money. The offer was as an “analog artist” for six months. She would be a stand-in for production and then she’d be replaced by Aria in post-production. Her face, voice, and actions would be carefully recorded by cameras and motion sensors then translated to control a digital puppet.
“Min Jee, if you ask me, it’s artistic graverobbing. You’re better than that,” commented Ren, a sculptor who lived in the same housing complex as her.
“Am I?” she countered, looking over at the minimalist décor on her door. “Am I better enough to refuse a meal? Am I better enough to sleep on a bench while I try to write something new?”
There was another reason that she didn’t share, as she worried she’d be seen as naïve. She hoped that when she entered the belly of the beast she’d be able to understand how it worked and figure out a way to work around it.
Or maybe that was just some desperate justification so she could keep surviving. While the work didn’t excite her, the idea that she was entering into a contract freely was laughable when the alternative was destitution.
So she arrived at the front gates of AmaCo Studios that next Monday. It was the first time she had seen it in person. The building was massive both in surface and in the sky. The crystal tower rose so high it pierced the clouds around it. Solar panels wrapped around the tower in bunches like it was garland and flowers stuck out of small holes in the windows at various levels.
She stepped inside and took a deep whiff of the air. It smelled like synthesized jasmine. A page-bot guided her through busy hallways to the “Anya’s Legacy Studio”. She stepped inside to a room which looked less like a film set and more like a medical classroom.
Jennie Kaplan was waiting for her. This was the Jennie, the legendary director who was behind every one of the top grossing movies for the last decade. Despite her fame, she looked calm and analytical. Jennie recognized this movie was little more than a technical exercise.
“Min Jee, welcome to AmaCo,” she said, her voice precise and formal. “We’ve already reviewed your baseline data and we think you will have a good aptitude for memetic performance. Today we’ll go through some training exercises, calibrating your facial expressions and vocal timbre against Aria. Just think of it like tuning an instrument.”
Min Jee nodded even as she understood she was seen as no more than an instrument to this formidable director. She was led to a small platform in the center of the room. Around her were arrays of sensors and LEDs. Her first task was not getting into the character of Iona, the star-navigator.
Instead she had to read out lines that Aria had said decades ago, the lines which made her famous. She was directed to say them like Aria. Like when Aria was angry. Like when Aria was happy. She had to weep like Aria had been heartbroken. And then do it again when she didn’t entirely capture that magic.
When they broke for lunch, she saw other analogs eating silently at their own tables. They were pale-looking figures in neutral-tone bodysuits. Evidently they were also awaiting the deepfake to cover up their real performance. Some moved in a robotic precision, already practiced in their replication. Others looked as new and lost as her.
The week passed by in a rush. Every day bled together in a monotonous cycle. She would stand on the clinically white soundstage. There wasn’t any backdrop or even a greenscreen, as that could all be added in later. She had to stand there with all eyes on her including dozens of capture sensors. She poured her energy into embodying Aria. Each time she deviated slightly, taking her own artistic liberties, she was critiqued by Jennie.
“Aria’s hand would’ve been raised a few inches higher when she said that.”
“The cadence of saying ‘starlight’ would have more inflection on ‘light’.”
“When you smile there, it’s showing too much teeth. Please keep your mouth closed.”
Min Jee went home each day exhausted. She felt like she was nothing more than a photocopier to replicate without the opportunity to inject any of her own original thought. The majesty of the studio’s tower felt like a sort of contemporary artistry she was being denied. This stifling affected her creativity when she was done from work too. As she tried to write her own original pieces, she felt a deep sense of writer’s block.
Still, Jennie was happy. She noticed how Min Jee pushed herself to replicate Aria’s performances. Sometimes one of her takes would have so much raw talent that it gave her pause. Min Jee’s performance wasn’t so much Aria but something distinctive. Jennie flagged these deviations for the AI to correct even as she held a curiosity for what she could do if given some freedom.
On Friday, Min Jee was surprised to see Bruno DeLeener in the room chatting with Jennie. When she came into the room, she was gestured to take a seat.
“Team, I just got the projections for the upcoming release of Alchemist’s Book...” he began.
“Alchemists Nook,” Jennie corrected.
“Our projections have just gone up, exceeding our expectations. This is only because of your hard work to quality and consistency, exactly what our audience has come to expect from us. We know the world continues to change unpredictably, and Aria remains a comfort and we will continue to honor her legacy.”
There was a habitual applause from the other analogs and Min Jee politely clapped as well. But she felt a tinge of regret around honoring the legacy of an actress long gone. Where was a freer market of art where people were able to create what they chose? A garden with one kind of flower hardly looked beautiful.
The freedom she did receive was economic. The stipend had given her an opportunity to take the monorail further uptown to the artisan districts. In dimly lit cafes and musty theaters she distributed her money to spoken-word poets and donate money to let a painter buy a new tube.
She enjoyed spending time in these spaces and meeting new people who saw art as a higher calling. She saw playwrights with ideas for stories she’d never considered before. She met musicians building new instruments out of recycled materials. Their work was often clumsy but occasionally brilliant. More importantly, they were willing to explore new ideas rather than circling a drain of stale ideas.
This gave Min Jee inspiration to pursue her own craft in her own way. When she was directed to deliver a line in Aria’s trademarked stoicism, she let out a soft whispering gasp afterwards. Once the line was spoken, she held her breath waiting for Jennie to notice and issue a correction, but her tiny rebellion hadn’t been caught.
Min Jee became emboldened and began to add her own signature variations on top of Aria’s performances, making sure she could push the envelope in each case without being caught. She held a glance a bit longer than Aria would, or modify her gait slightly, or blink more frequently than expected. None were particularly noticeable, but she enjoyed the feeling of self-direction and exploring a character in a way more personal than her mandated robotic directions.
These changes were noticed by Jennie when she spent each night in post-production, overlaying the captured performance with Aria’s likeness. The AI had been flagging Min Jee’s contributions with variance indicators. The first time they came up, she simply used the AI to correct the performances with tiny sensory adjustments as she usually did. Yet as they kept appearing, she began to wonder whether this was really an accident.
One evening in particular, Jennie was watching Aria delivering a eulogy built upon the underlying performance of Min Jee. Then she turned off Aria and watched Min Jee doing the same performance raw. The deepfake had stuck to the script and the blocking, but it couldn’t capture grief as powerfully as Min Jee. If it had been Aria, she would’ve lauded the fresh take. Yet since Aria never did, it couldn’t be said to be Aria-like.
Jennie knew it was a betrayal of her job to keep these variations in the final work. Yet she had been an artist, once, when she was young. She decided to allow some of Min Jee’s most defensible nuances to pass through the rendering pipeline. If asked, she could just call them “sub-perceptual deviations” and move on.
June was known as the top media critic in the “Aria-verse”. Her forums were usually full of unquestioning loyalty to Aria and the movies produced by AmaCo every month. Yet more recently, new threads had topics like “Aria has become predictable”.
As the admin of the forums and someone with encyclopedic knowledge, even June had started to agree. She saw how the originals had a human imperfection to them, whereas the latest movies felt overly polished without any opportunity for a moment to show the human soul.
Although the threads quickly turned into flame wars between critics and superfans, she could tell there was a vibe shifting beginning as the critics became more in number. Younger audiences didn’t remember the real Aria and rarely sought out the original works. They only saw the endless list of digital versions which replaced real actresses.
Jennie read these posts. The superfans were the ones who always saw these movies and purchased the merchandise. She could tell there was some people looking for something new, and she began to wonder if she already had the new thing under her contract.
Min Jee had been contracted for a new project, a new winter holiday special that would combine fake snow and old carols, all in the same likeness of Aria. In one scene, Min Jee was supposed to gaze into a holographic snow globe while softly humming the opening of a song.
She decided to take a bold step that morning. She approached Jennie, who was busy reviewing the script with a coffee in her hands.
“Ms. Kaplan,” she started nervously. “I had a proposal, for the snow globe scene. I know I’m supposed to just hum, but I had written a monologue that I could say instead. It would be me, playing an original character. I thought I could call her Luna, like about the moon. It’s just a few lines.”
Jennie set down the script and took the tablet that Min Jee clutched anxiously in her arms. She reviewed it. The speech was raw, awkward in some spaces, but absolutely out of character for Aria. Her responsibility at this stage would be to shut this down, to report Min Jee, and find a new actress.
Then she thought back to the fan forums, and she looked into Min Jee’s bold eyes. A new voice for half a minute couldn’t be that harmful. The monologue was... it needed work. It lacked the polish of a standard Aria script. Maybe that was good. Maybe Jennie had more to offer cinema than an echo of the past.
“The scheduling for this holiday special is tight though. And this... it needs a bit of work.”
“I understand, Ms. Kaplan.”
“I think there is an opportunity though. Something small. I can pass it to the writers to clean it up.”
“”Thank you, Ms. Kaplan,” Min Jee said, a genuine smile spreading across her face. “I really appreciate it.”
Jennie gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. “Don’t thank me yet, Min Jee. This is just an atmospheric test. We’ll call it ‘Luna’s Whisper’. We’ll see how this goes. It might not make the final cut.”
A few days later, Min Jee got her words back. They had been changed. Nothing significant, but she agreed that the modifications were an improvement. She stepped onto the small stage and spoke. She said Luna’s words, her words, with a heartfelt authenticity. She spoke about dreaming for the future, for all the ordinary people who wanted to see themselves.
Jennie spent the next few days watching the entire special come together. Bruno sat by her every morning as they watched the current cut. Every morning she looked nervously over at him as he took frantic notes about every little piece that was wrong and needed fixing. His comments were around the density of tinsel on the digital trees and the pigments of the costumes, but never on Luna.
As always, sales and views for this special were high. Jennie got a nice corporate bonus as a result. When she checked the forums, she didn’t see any discussions around the songs or the story. However, there was a lot of interest in the very brief appearance of ‘Luna’. People seemed intrigued. They posted a lot of speculation and wanted to learn more. They seemed more eager for Luna than Aria. It was clear that a new star was just being born.