telepresence

18+!!Yesterday I read the Taffy Brodesser-Akner profile of A.I. actor Tilly Norwood for New York Times Magazine, and I plan to read it 50 more times. It’s really an iceberg of a profile about Tilly’s creator, Eline van der Velden, a former aspiring actor whose spirit Tilly embodies (if Tilly can really be said to be the embodiment of anyone, which is questionable). It’s clear—although Akner, a veteran writer, is deft enough to never say so outright—that van der Velden, cut down over the course of a terribly short adulthood by multitudinous microaggressions and professional disappointments, is not only highly masked, but is in fact a disembodied ghost, using the avatar of Tilly as a vessel to channel her spirit. At certain points it’s unclear whether van der Velden sees Tilly Norwood as a fully separate entity with a ‘life of her own’. I mean, she isn’t, and she doesn’t, but it’s also hard to tell who I mean when I say “she.” And I thought about how people are systematically turfed out…