"No Ghost, Just a Shell"
After having looked over a few chapters in the book, Digital Art, by Christiane Paul, I decided to focus on Digital Technologies as a Medium. Since I’m doing a small video for my final project, I thought the film and video section of this chapter would be interesting.
As I was reading through the chapter, I realized my expectations of what I was going to read were quite off, though I enjoyed what I found. Ultimately, I settled on a portion of the chapter that focused on two artists: Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. The two collaborated on a project back in 1999 called No Ghost Just a Shell. I found this part particularly interesting, because I have many friends who love the anime fad that hit the U.S. a while ago. Though I have never followed the story lines of anime, I have always been interested in the animation process of the genre.
Though I originally thought this portion of the book would focus on the animation of anime and the craze it’s taken over this country (since a picture originally caught my eye), I was, again, a bit surprised to see that the two artists had bought an anime character to use in an entirely different way. I was entrigued with the work, but, even after having read this section of the book several times, was a bit confused in some aspects, so I went online to find out some more information about the project.
Parreno and Huyghe decided to purchase the copyright for a character called Annlee. I hadn’t known, but apparently agencies, which create the characters for anime, have a scale in which they rank each creation. The more complex ones are more expensive and tend to be characters who’s last quite a bit longer in the life of a particular anime. Annlee was created as an “extra,� so to speak, and had no particular traits anyone would remember. In a sense, Parreno and Huyghe rescued Annlee from a deletion file. In their next step, Parreno and Huyghe commissioned several artists to use Annlee in their work, which they could use a compilation later.
Having done more research on the project No Ghost Just a Shell, I find myself having a very difficult time putting the whole concept of the work into words. I guess the best I could say would be the connetion they make with the anime world and the real world. As the creators of anime characters create different types with different features and complexities, they also create some with direct intentions of “killing� them after a few uses, and Parreno and Huyghe reference the comparisons with humans in real life.
Well, I find I really can’t summarize the concept of their project very well, but the most well-put website I have found on the project is:
http://www.mmparis.com/noghost.html
I really enjoyed learning about these two artists and their project. Hopefully I can, in the future, make a point of noticing comparisons between the art we take for granted (such as digitally animated cartoons – sorry anime fans . . . they’re not cartoons) and the world as we know it. That, I think, will make my art a bit more in-depth.