gracie dowd

Vernacular 2046 is a world-building project developed in Supercraft for a class assignment to imagine a specific world twenty years in the future. I didn't start knowing where or what my world would be — it emerged through the design process itself, anchored by the ʻōhiʻa lehua and the upcountry Kula landscape I grew up in.

Electric Night is an audio-visual composition made in TouchDesigner, projected onto a wall as a group installation. The four of us each built our own scene, all synced to a single track, and the piece cycles between them using an LFO-driven scene switcher tied to the audio.

My scene uses instanced ring geometry that reacts to different parts of the track: the bass modulates ring size and offset, the mids drive rotation and color, and the highs feed into a feedback and bloom chain that gets mirrored for symmetry. The whole piece is inspired by a 2000s club.

This essay analyzes a PacSun campaign image featuring Lil Miquela — a virtual influencer, a computer-generated character who functions as a real social media celebrity. I use the image to think about how the concept of aura shifts in digital visual culture.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin, alongside Berger, Manovich, Krauss, Steyerl, and Somaini, I argue that aura doesn't disappear in images of virtual influencers — it transforms. The photograph no longer reproduces a body that once stood before the camera; it constructs one.

Aura, which Benjamin tied to the singular presence of an artwork in a specific time and place, migrates in Lil Miquela's case toward the continuity of a digital persona across platforms, and further toward the circulation of the image itself. What holds authority is no longer the trace of physical presence but the coherence of a constructed figure and the movement of its images through digital networks.