Artificial Life, Inc.

Artificial Life, Inc. is the Hong Kong software company behind Vivienne, a virtual girlfriend presented in 2005 as a new use for mobile-phone technology. Its product joined computerized voice synthesis, streaming video, and text messages in a screen-based companion, making the company an example of how commercial software could turn digitally mediated intimacy into a marketable service.

Company and Product

The passage places Artificial Life in the wake of the Tamagotchi phenomenon, in which users interacted with a virtual pet through a small electronic toy. In March 2005, the company brought Vivienne to market for people seeking an alternative to the time, effort, and expense associated with a real-life girlfriend. Her combination of synthesized voice, video, and messaging was also intended to attract customers to newer third-generation, or 3G, cell phones.

Vivienne had a defined, limited repertoire of courtship. She liked being taken to movies and bars and receiving virtual flowers and chocolates; the product stopped short of more intimate interaction. The passage notes that companies had already approached Artificial Life about developing a more sexually explicit version, indicating interest in extending the original product beyond those limits.

Market Plans and Positioning

At the time described, Vivienne was scheduled to become available in Western Europe by late spring 2005, with possible release in a few American cities by year’s end. Artificial Life also anticipated possible companion products: first a virtual boyfriend for women, then a virtual boyfriend for gay men and a virtual girlfriend for lesbians. These plans framed Vivienne not as a single novelty but as the beginning of a product line intended to address different potential users.

The company emphasized that Vivienne was not meant to replace a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, but rather to serve as practice before a real relationship. The passage leaves that assurance unsettled: if ordinary contact with real people is increasingly mediated by screens, removing the human partner altogether may appear less like a departure than a further step in the same development.

Intimacy and Mediation

Vivienne’s effectiveness depends, in the account, on users’ awareness that she does not really exist. The gap between that knowledge and the interaction’s appeal connects the product to the familiar fantasy of a ghost inside a machine: the user responds to an apparent presence produced by a technical system. The example therefore shifts attention from whether Vivienne is human to how a person experiences an interaction whose other party is software.

The passage uses Vivienne to clarify its account of sexual relations: even sex with a real partner may involve the partner as support for one’s own imagined activity. In this reading, a virtual girlfriend does not simply replace an otherwise unmediated relation. Artificial Life’s product makes visible the role of fantasy and mediation in intimacy, while its marketing promise of practice for a future real relationship leaves open whether that distinction can be maintained.