In an interview in Ocula Magazine with Stephanie Bailey, Huyghe explained that he chose 'artists who construct worlds that have the capacity to endlessly change, rather than as makers of things'[3] — a quality that translates to his own practice.
[7] In 1999, Huyghe and fellow French artist Philippe Parreno turned this idea of the subjective performance of language into the body of a fictional character by purchasing the rights to a manga figure whom they dubbed "Annlee".
[8] They then invited other artists including Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Joseph, Mélik Ohanian, Joe Scanlan, and Rirkrit Tiravanija to produce various works utilizing the character Annlee, the sum of which became the traveling group exhibition No Ghost Just A Shell.
[10] Huyghe's two-channel video The Third Memory (1999), commissioned by The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and later exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, takes as its starting point Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon,[11] starring Al Pacino in the role of the bank robber John Wojtowicz.
As a film work, A Journey that Wasn't juxtaposes a sailing expedition from Tierra del Fuego in search of an uncharted island off the coast of Antarctica, with the recording (and re-recording) of its symphonic score at the Wollman ice rink in Central Park.
The film's premier at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, was accompanied by several of Huyghe's Zoodram sculptures, elaborate aquariums featuring exotic sea creatures that are not unlike the captive human ecosystem depicted in The Host and the Cloud.