Artists Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger – eteam – spent the last ten months in Taiwan to research how the vibrant practices of performing hand-puppet plays are connected to our current use of handheld smart devices.

In their presentation eteam will ponder if the religious, educational and cultural functions of Taiwanese puppet plays, which are performed in a great variety of local styles at temples, schools, public parks and cultural institutions can be compared to the ways contemporary societies use hand-held smart devices to communicate, learn, entertain and possibly connect to “higher powers.” Are there connections to be drawn between Puppet Stage and Social Feed, LLM’s and traditional speech patterns that generate and narrate epics, puppeteers and smart phone users, uploading and worshipping? Where do soul, processing power, artificial intelligence, and wisdom reside—and how are they transmitted? What can puppets do, that humans can’t and what roles do our human hands play in the production of the stories that shape our minds?

A discussion around these topics will be stirred by media theorist, researcher and curator Natasha A. Chuk who studies media objects as systems of language, creativity, and persuasive power to think about how they shape/reshape visuality, geographies, publics, and ways of being. How can we understand the world phenomenologically and through our tools and practices — and what are ways our individual, collective, social, and political identities and behaviors are imagined, performed, and perceived? How does the study of analog, traditional hand-puppetry help us to understand our relationship to our hand-operated digital devices?