Citations:synthespian

Noun: "a completely computer-generated character who appears in a film or work of a similar medium; a virtual actor"

 * 1995 — Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, G. P. Putnam's Sons (1995), ISBN 9780874777796, page 161:
 * The age of the synthespian means even less employment for an industry suffering from underemployment.
 * 1995 — David A. Kaplan, "A New Wave Of Films From The Cybercrowd", Newsweek, 3 December 1995:
 * A decade ago, "Young Sherlock Holmes" represented the state of the art. In it, a stained-glass knight--animated by "Toy Story's" John Lasseter--became the fast-ever computer-generated "synthespian."
 * 1996 — William Gibson, Idoru, Berkley Books (1996), ISBN 1101158050, unnumbered page:
 * "'Idol-singer.' She is Rei Toei. She is a person-ality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a 'synthespian,' in Hollywood."
 * 1999 — Lester Faigley, "Material Literacy and Visual Design", in Rhetorical Bodies (eds. Jack Selzer & Sharon Crowley), University of Wisconsin Press (1999), ISBN 9780299164706, page 188:
 * The era of the virtual actor — the "vactor" or "synthespian" — cannot be far in the future.
 * 2002 — Peter Rainer, "Screen Dream", New York, 25 August 2002:
 * A composite of vocal intonations and body parts from a gallery of famous leading ladies as well as a blend of apparently every supermodel on the planet, the alluring "synthespian" Simone is a glossy, soulless pastiche.
 * 2004 — Matthew Bach, "Digital Actors Swing Into Hollywood", Digital Arts, 7 June 2004:
 * Lead roles for digital actors certainly provide the lure for visual-effects artists, and are seen as the sexiest part of synthespian creation – and many cite Gollum as a prime example of a lead CG character.
 * 2006 — Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy, Wallflower Press (2006), ISBN 1904764843, page 205:
 * Final Fantasy apparently took 200 digital artists four years to make; a whole year was needed just to perfect the 60,000 hairs on the head of the heroine, Dr Aki Ross, the first photo-realistic 'synthespian' to lead a movie.
 * 2008 — Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Routledge (2008), ISBN 0203938135, page 170:
 * The primary question the synthespian raises for intellectual property law is directly connected to the ontological question that makes Gollum a problem for existing conceptions of acting: whose performance is it, anyway?
 * 2012 — Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality, Rutgers University Press (2012), ISBN 9780813552187, pages 6-7:
 * Enduring anxieties about synthespians replacing real actors have tended to obscure the ways that digital imaging provides expanded opportunities for actors to play types of characters and to inhabit situations and environments that were foreclosed to them in the analog era.