Marcy Cortega

Marcy Cortega is a Belgian virtual pop star created by Pieter Marnef, founder of the startup Chroniclefields.

Marcy originally began as a fictional character. Six years ago, Pieter Marnef—whose specialty is fiction writing—wrote a series in which Marcy is a Gen Z young woman who must create social media content for a school project and is graded by her follower count. At a disadvantage because she is playful and “not the prettiest in the group,” she develops a virtual avatar to represent her; in the story, the avatar ends up coming to life through AI and becoming more successful than its own creator. At the time, TV channels rejected the series project, judging the concept too science-fiction.

Years later, Marnef decided to bring Marcy into the real world as a live experiment. A first test took place as an interactive quiz before a major show at the Sportpaleis: participants spent most of their time chatting with the virtual host about topics unrelated to the quiz, and they kept interacting even a month after the event ended.

Following that, Marcy gained a public presence: she performed at the TMF Awards, accompanied by real dancers and musicians, including a duet with Jessy from The Mackenzie featuring Jessy, aiming to create a symbiosis between the virtual and the real. She also appeared as a virtual host on Proximus Pickx+, entirely computer-generated, with no actress and no live filming.

Marcy is described as an “Advanced Virtual Personality (AVP)”: a virtual profile built around a storytelling narrative, with a coherent history and personality. She relies on large language models combined with deepfake and AI video-generation technologies; her visual appearance comes from models trained on content owned by the Chroniclefields team.

The project is primarily a proof of concept meant to demonstrate that a real emotional bond can form between a human and a virtual avatar. It is also intended to open the door to commercial applications—such as virtual brand mascots or intelligent customer assistants—through Chroniclefields, which has signed contracts with Proximus and Pelckmans Publishers.