Interestingly enough, the most impressive examples of computer-generated models are those with meticulously-computed imperfections (of the sort that get photoshopped out of photographs of live models). Though these are outnumbered by male geeks' idealised fantasy images of The Perfect Woman:
Obsessive behaviour often creates obsessive subject matter. Which is perhaps why a fair chunk of Weidemann's book could be written off as coffee-table porn. For every hyper-realistic exploration of a digital woman, such as Kaya, Digital Beauties features three with unrealistically large breasts. But filter out the provocative imagery of scantily clad women and you will discover some of the finest examples of computer graphics yet produced. Take Daniel Robichaud's hauntingly real digital resurrection of Marlene Dietrich. The Canadian animator chose the German chanteuse as the subject of his digital model and brought her back to life a decade after her death. The effect is simply breathtaking.
And then there's the story of Annlee, rescued from copyright slavery by two artists and now living it up in the creative commons:
As the critic Elizabeth Bard commented in the art magazine Contemporary, until the pair of French artists freed her from the Manga studio, Annlee was no more than an extra, "destined to live no more than a few pages in a comic book or frames of a film". Instead, Annlee has enjoyed a rather more illustrious career, showing at the Venice Biennalle, the New York Guggenheim, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London before culminating in a solo show called No Ghost Just a Shell at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier this year.
Stay tuned for the story of how Baptist hackers trojaned the Reykjavik idoru who hosted MTV Europe's 2004 awards.