In 1999, the French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno found the image of ‘Annlee’ in the catalogue of Kworks, a Japanese media agency that develops manga gures for animated films, comic strips, advertising, and video games. The prices of these images depend on the complexity of their character traits. The copyright for this one — a nondescript, expendable, empty vessel ripe for exploitation — was cheap: a mere $428 for her digital file.

Parreno and Huyghe purchased this avatar and named her Annlee (aka AnnLee, or Ann Lee), giving her a cosmetic makeover, then later setting up a state-of-the-art video animation facility for her in Paris. They then began to create her life and story
— expanding the French Surrealist tradition of the “exquisite corpse” — they lent her free of charge to other artists, commissioned to do likewise. In doing so, the character of Annlee was removed from the commercial sector - in which her image may be bought and sold for publicity, press, video games and televisual products - enabling her to exist independently of these constraints, so that her story could unfold in myriad ways through the intervention of leading contemporary artists, who could experiment with new narratives for her.

Thanks to her new handlers, she acquired an identity, multiple identities, in fact, and a voice, several voices. She achieved something approaching self-consciousness. Her existence was prolonged; she’d have experiences her original creators had never dreamed of for her. With so many artists animating her, investing her with various virtual inner and outer lives and a wardrobe of personalities, she’d gained quasi-celebrity status, maybe even a kind of immortality.

The very first episode in the No Ghost Just a Shell saga was Philippe’s video work Anywhere Out of the World (2000), in
which the manga character Annlee is given a self-re exive monologue, explaining her destiny as a character created, bought, redrawn, and vocalised. This work is composed of a single sequence. The absence of pupils along with the motion capture animation, which involves recording the movement of an actor and translating it to a digital model, emphasised the emptiness of the character. Annlee is a puppet, delivering her monologue on her personal history, her price and her fate.

Returning to the project after fifteen years, Parreno presents a new version of his video work from 2000, Anywhere Out of the World. It has been updated and remastered in a high de nition, 3D version of the lm, with a new script and voiceover. It was presented for the first time at a major exhibition of Parreno’s work for his solo exhibition ‘Synchronicity’ at the Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum, which opened in July 2017. A new re-edited version appeared at another major solo exhibition at the Museo Jumex, Mexico City, which opened September 2017.