Vivienne, the virtual girlfriend

Vivienne, the virtual girlfriend, is a software companion whose significance lies beyond its novelty as a phone feature. Introduced as a screen-based partner with carefully bounded forms of interaction, Vivienne becomes a test case for the book’s argument that human intimacy is already mediated by fantasy. The apparent contrast between a virtual companion and a flesh-and-blood partner, the text suggests, conceals a more unsettling continuity: neither kind of relation offers access to an entirely unmediated other.

Product and Design

The product followed the Tamagotchi, the virtual pet encountered through the screen of a small electronic toy. In March 2005, the Hong Kong software company Artificial Life brought Vivienne to market, presenting the development as a step from caring for a digital pet to interacting with a digital girlfriend. The book places this launch in the context of a media story about people seeking an alternative to the time, effort, and expense associated with a real-life girlfriend; it does not establish that this was the company’s only intended audience or purpose.

Vivienne combined computerized voice synthesis, streaming video, and text messages. The software was designed to attract customers to new third-generation mobile phones, making the simulated relationship part of a commercial pitch for more advanced communications technology. Her available activities were intentionally limited: she liked being taken to movies and bars and receiving virtual flowers and chocolates, but did not undress and would go no further than blowing kisses. The boundary was part of the product as described, not evidence that Vivienne could reciprocate as a person would.

The account also records the prospect of expansion. Artificial Life had already been contacted by companies interested in a racier, potentially pornographic version. Vivienne was scheduled to become available in Western Europe by late spring 2005, with a possible release in a few American cities by the end of the year. The company anticipated other versions too: a virtual boyfriend for women, followed by a boyfriend for gay men and a girlfriend for lesbians. These were projected additions, rather than products the passage says had already launched.

The Promise of a Simulated Companion

Artificial Life emphasized that Vivienne was not meant to substitute for a flesh-and-blood girlfriend. The company described her instead as a practice round before a real relationship. The book leaves that reassuring distinction open to doubt. If communication with real people is already increasingly mediated by screens, it asks, why retain the physical person as an indispensable part of the exchange? Vivienne’s importance lies partly in making that question difficult to dismiss as merely hypothetical.

The comparison with Alan Turing’s proposed test for machine intelligence sharpens the issue. On that account, a machine would count as possessing human intelligence if, after a long conversation, a human interlocutor could not determine whether the exchange was with a person or a machine. Vivienne is not said to pass this test. Rather, the test supplies a frame for considering how convincingly a manufactured interaction might occupy the place of a human interlocutor—and what that apparent equivalence does and does not establish.

The text links Vivienne to the familiar idea of a ghost in the machine. As an example, it describes the kind of fanciful suspicion that can arise when using an automated coffee machine at an airport or train station: perhaps a hidden dwarf is inside, responding to buttons and coins by preparing and delivering the coffee. The imagined operator does not make the machine human. It shows how readily a user can project an unseen agent into an automated exchange. Vivienne makes that projection more elaborate through a voice, an image, and messages, while users remain aware that she does not really exist.

Fantasy, Mediation, and the Sexual Relation

Vivienne’s apparent efficacy despite that awareness leads the book to Jacques Lacan’s proposition that there is no sexual relation in the sense of a formula guaranteeing a harmonious fit between partners. The point is not that a virtual companion and a person are identical. It is that the ordinary opposition between solitary fantasy and supposedly direct intimacy is less secure than it appears. The book argues that even a relation with a real partner is structured by fantasy: the other person can become a support through which an individual’s imagined scenarios are lived out.

On this account, the virtual partner does not create mediation where none previously existed. Instead, Vivienne makes mediation conspicuous. Her users know that the companion presented on the screen is not a flesh-and-blood person; that knowledge gives the example its force, because the interaction can still work for them. The disturbance for those invested in the idea of real communication with real people is therefore not simply that the physical partner has been removed. It is the recognition that fantasy was already involved in relations with physical partners as well.

The Return of the Real

The book connects this thorough virtualization of sexual interplay to the distinction between reality and the Real. It describes two apparently opposed tendencies—the pursuit of the Real and the pursuit of semblance—as sides of a single phenomenon. As sexual interaction becomes more completely virtualized, the excluded reality of the flesh-and-blood partner does not simply disappear. In the argument presented here, it returns as a drive toward extreme experiences of pleasure and pain. Vivienne thus serves as more than a prediction about phone software: she helps expose how the fantasy of escaping mediation can coexist with a renewed demand for what feels most immediate and real.