SPIRIT CORP.
2019, Animation, 00:02:33
‘Spirit Corp.’ is a dark exploration into humanity’s fixation with the digital, which imagines a possible future where an Asiatic human finds herself re-rendered into cyberspace. Based on a photogrammetric scan of the artist the character appears as a virtual rendering of a once physical body, styled to at once to heighten her Asian-ness and announce her position as a futuristic entity.
The work questions how in a world where we understand so little of what makes us human, we can ever successfully seek to replicate, transpose, or upgrade our humanity. It shines a light on humanity’s arrogance in believing to understand ourselves and the world around us, when we fundamentally do not comprehend what a soul means and is.
As an expression of this, when the character begins to explore her new body she dissolves, melting into a dark, inky fluid. We see her struggling against the black liquid, which stands as a representation our engulfing and consuming, black mirrored devices. She momentarily surfaces, her body merged into a flower, before being pulled back into the inky depths. Ultimately her digital shell and the ghost of her human consciousness prove incompatible, and she finds herself trapped between two diametric states.
'Spirit Corp.' was commissioned by the BBC and was created with support from Screen South and Arts Council England. It aired on BBC4 as part of Get Animated hosted by Ali Plumb.
Watch it on iPlayer here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08b30c0