CHARACTER vs. BODY

The key to character design is investing the design with an appearance of life. Animating it in the sense of lending it an "anima" or soul, so that, in the words of French philosopher George Didi-Huberman: "what we see looks back at us". It is what we project onto the image that triggers this animation – but it is the density and strength of their design that makes characters an ideal screen for our imaginations.

For German art historian Hans Belting who represents the "iconic turn", there is a strong link between the dead body and the image. According to his anthropological approach, the corpse, being so radically different from the body while alive, was the first ever image. "Images, preferably three-dimensional ones, replaced the bodies of the dead, who had lost their visible presence along with their bodies. Images, on behalf of the missing body, occupied the place deserted by the person who had died." As a tactile abstraction, dolls and fetishes transported the dead body into the realm of the image. (more...)

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