Animation and Puppetry: Gathering Voices in the Theater of Attraction
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Art and Robotics
Presentation Title:
- Animation and Puppetry: Gathering Voices in the Theater of Attraction
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
“Sharing in the trickery of the automaton is merely another way to define ourselves as human?”
_Jean- Claude Beaune, “The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century”This presentation explores the intersections of character animation, European automata, and Japanese Bunraku puppetry as mechanisms of simulation, moral introspection and theaters of attraction. These stand-ins employ attraction and illusion to suspend the viewer between belief and disbelief, desire and repulsion. They also allow the viewer to indulge in that which is forbidden and unspeakable; ghosts, monsters, death, loss of boundaries, and magic. Through borrowing and altering dialogues from chat rooms related to infanticide, crime, punishment and retribution, my work investigates how the Internet can become a site of social determination and regulation. Character animations which speak these dialogues embody the contradictions of identity found between the real and the represented body. The public space of electronic society becomes a form of “Orai”.
Full text (PDF) p. 168
