What?

Manifesting Monsters: Preserving and Expanding Local Mythologies

It’s a digital puppetry project that uses abstract speech visualization to create shapes that are made into puppets.

Your voice is used to manifest mythical puppet monsters (!)

How?!

It’s complicated, which is why I made that video.

What’s more important is…what will you speak? What will you say to manifest your puppet monster?

Why?

This project is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings, which is a compilation of all the mythical monsters and fantastic creatures throughout literary history, up to the time of it’s publication. I wondered why we don’t make monsters anymore, and if we did, what would they look like? Surely like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We might not even recognize them.

I’ve also been fascinated by asemic writing, which is like scribbling. It deals with meaninglessness; it takes the structures of writing (letters, punctuation, spacing, paragraphs, etc.) and thinks of those as art. Here’s an example by my favorite artist Donna Maria deCreeft (follow her!) Notice how you go between trying to interpret, and just observing. This is part of the process of meaning making.

I thought “What if we could make these shapes into puppets?!” We did some experiments with ink, and made some very cool and strange shadow puppets out of the abstract shapes we created. They looked like nothing and many things at the same time.

Then…

I asked, what would happen if instead of using ink to make abstract shapes, we used our voice?

I created a short film as another iteration of this project, which premiered at The Brick’s Exponential Festival in January 2024: