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Globalization in Sanrio’s Virtual Festival: enhancing sacred places, character representation, and musical public spaces

2024; Taylor & Francis; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14794713.2023.2299185

2040-0934

Asuka Yamazaki,

Digital Media and Visual Art

This paper discusses Sanrio Virtual Festival 2023, held on VRChat in 2022 by Sanrio, a company known for its character business, which includes Hello Kitty. This study explains how Sanrio is gaining global power toward creating a new utopia through multilayered live performances. To this end, the virtual Puroland reinforces the function of a sacred place in pop culture by incorporating diverse musical and cultural resources instead of the cult-like image of a cute sanctuary. Furthermore, media that mixes 2D/2.5D characters creates ones in dynamic 3D with enhanced ubiquity. Through parasocial relations with the user, this humanized digital medium provides users with a sense of life and presence as well as diminishes their perceptual discomfort, while promoting an experience of realism and community grafted onto the user's extended cultural fantasy. Furthermore, the experience is characterized by stages with various conceptual designs that communicate nonverbally and multisensory, including optical live performances and DJ clubs, which have led to the creation of an interactive global Sanrio public sphere from the formation of a complex musical public space. However, the creation of such an emotional musical community is a communicative process that also voraciously consumes its users' presence and involvement.