Digital Marionette
The interactive installation Digital Marionette impressively shows the audience the look and feel of a puppet in the multimedia era: The nicely dressed wooden marionette is replaced by a Lara Croft - like character; the traditional strings attached to puppet control handles emerge into a network of computer cables. The installation is currently exhibited at Ars Electronica Center in Linz).
The installation consists of a projection of a digital face, which can be controlled by the visitors. The puppet can be made talking via speech input, and the classical puppet controls serve as controllers for head direction and face emotions, such as joy, anger, or sadness. The whole artistic concept was designed and realised in an interdisciplinary manner, incorporating art historical facts about marionettes, the architectural space, interaction design, and state of the art research results from computer graphics and speech recognition.
The Digital Marionette was conceived and realised by Corebounce Association. Corebounce is a collective of artists and scientists with the common goal of mediating between arts, science, and technology. Corebounce maintains a number of new media projects and their own multimedia software research platform, Soundium. The Scheinwerfer project is the most active one, dealing with live visuals performance at electronic dance music events. Corebounce is organised as a non-profit association and collaborates with a number of partners from education, in particular with ETH Zürich, and industry.
Corebounce: http://www.corebounce.org/