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© Philippe Parreno
ULANDA BLAIR:
My name is Ulanda Blair. I'm Curator of Moving Image at M+, and also one of the co-curators of Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia.
Anywhere is a 3D animation made by French artist Philippe Parreno in 2017.
The figure you see on screen is Annlee. She's an anime character that was created for a project called No Ghost Just a Shell that Parreno made between 2000 and 2002 with fellow French artist Pierre Huyghe.
Anywhere is closely connected to the anime Ghost in the Shell. Both explore the idea of identity and artificial life. In Ghost in the Shell, a cyborg named Major Motoko Kusanagi questions whether or not she has a soul.
In Anywhere, Annlee also reflects on her status as a manufactured image. She's a character that is bought, owned, and reproduced. Both works really blur the line between human and artificial life. Both question whether consciousness and identity can exist within a digital body.
Annlee is a manga and anime character directly borrowed from pop culture. The artist shows us how fantasy allows us to explore transformation and metamorphosis beyond the limits of the physical world.
This work is titled Anywhere. It is a 3D animation by Philippe Parreno made in 2017. The six-minute animation has colour and sound. It requires 3D glasses to view it.
The character in the animation is called Annlee; she is a generic animation character bought by the artist from a catalogue. She has smooth, fair skin and a face shaped like an inverted triangle. Her large, almond-shaped eyes are a blank grey with no iris or pupil. She has fine, arched brows, a small nose, and a small mouth. Her shoulder-length hair is purplish blue with a centre-parted fringe, partially revealing her pointed ears. She is wearing a V-neck top in light blue. As a generic animation character, her appearance lacks texture and detail. In the animation, Annlee narrates how she was created.
The animation has a dark purple background. Annlee’s head and upper torso appear on the screen, shifting throughout her monologue. She sometimes appears larger, then smaller, moving closer to and further away from the audience and shifting to left and right. She explains the ways various artists have used her image to create artworks. As she talks about each of her different forms, she holds up a photograph of herself and leans forward, as if showing the photograph to the camera.
Annlee’s facial expression and monologue suggest a hint of sadness. The end of the animation shows a close-up of her face. She is expressionless, then smiles very slightly. The screen gradually dims until Annlee disappears.