[IMPULSES] The puppet: Anatomies of disquiet

I will start with what may seem like a risky comparison between puppets and new media. Their presence shares certain common features: both appear not only in art but also in everyday, functional, playful, commercial, standardized, repetitive, mass-produced, and even imposed forms — highly present within culture, though rather outside the sphere of art. Thus, works created by artists usually distinguish themselves from such popular manifestations, while at the same time remaining conscious of their existence and drawing inspiration and emotion from them. New technologies and puppetry are also connected through the fact that they are similarly metaphorized by literature, by common cultural imaginaries, and by art itself. These metaphors concern the imitation of life, anxiety — both before the indifference of inanimate forms and before the possibility of their coming alive, undertaking destructive actions, dangerous activities, hidden or even covert influence.

I therefore treat the theme of the Lalka Nova conference not only as an encouragement to outline a vision of the future of puppetry in its progressive union with new media, but also as an opportunity to present, at least preliminarily, the phenomenon of the spectacular, multidimensional, and multifaceted presence of the puppet in contemporary art.

From the wealth of examples drawn from the field of art, I will focus primarily on those that illustrate the anxiety of reason in postmodern society when confronted with the power of imagination. Situated in a disturbing proximity to madness, puppetry is capable of revealing phenomena in all their multiplicity and of giving form to emotions and fears.

In addition to examples from the art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries connected with the anatomies of material, mechanical, and virtual representations of the body, my presentation will also include references to formative phenomena from a somewhat more distant past — namely, the practices of the artistic avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century, but also to phantoms originating in the eighteenth century.

BELLMER

I would like to begin with the phenomenon of the dolls created by Hans Bellmer in the 1930s. The French Surrealists, upon accepting him into their ranks, called him a “murderer of peaceful consciences,” and in his figures they saw the realization of impossible convulsive beauty — one that concretized hidden desires, destabilized norms, and exposed the repressed thoughts of the era.

Bellmer, a German artist born in 1902 in Katowice, who moved to Berlin in his youth and later fled from the Nazis to Paris in the late 1930s, expressed throughout his art the conviction that desire precedes and constructs modern being. His work “astonishes erotically because, rather than containing ‘naturalistic’ descriptions, it attempts a photographic transcription of mental images, phantasms, and sensations generated by desire” — as Konstanty A. Jeleński wrote in a book devoted to Bellmer. He further stated: “A liberating work is rarely the achievement of a truly free person; on the contrary, it is most often born in the mind of someone tormented by barriers that restrain, thwart, or pervert desire.”¹

“It terrifies animals and children… the inside of the bedsheets serves it as a mirror”² — this was how Paul Éluard described Bellmer’s Doll in one of his prose poems inspired by it. Bellmer himself, speaking of his work that disregarded cultural injunctions to keep desires hidden, fascinations restrained, and corporeality relegated to shame, wrote: “The beginning of my scandalous work lies in the fact that the world itself is a great scandal,”³ and also: “The body may be compared to a sentence that begs to be dismantled so that, through an endless series of anagrams, its true meanings may be discovered.”⁴ Bellmer’s dolls are such scandalous anagrams of the body, whose revelation earlier art had to justify through mythology or religion, for example in depictions of the martyrdom of saints. Meanwhile, Bellmer himself claimed that his work emerged from “the conscious or unconscious inner workings of our organism and the displacements of the dominant excitation within it.”⁵

This meaning is gradually extracted by Bellmer, also ex post facto — that is, after the object’s creation — when he photographs the Doll posed against the backdrop of an abandoned garden, in dusty corners, or in a disheveled bed. These photographs testify to the continuation of a process that did not end with the creation of the object itself. Over several subsequent years, every appearance of the doll in a photogram becomes a discovery and an interpretation performed by the artist himself. The character of this work is therefore not only sculptural but also photographic. Although it remains object-based, it is an object in process, in a relationship that forms part of that process — a process that is also camera-oriented and performative.

THE INVASION OF MANNEQUINS

At the beginning of the twentieth century, alongside the mass development of production and trade and the rise of ready-made clothing, mannequins began appearing en masse in shop windows. Human-sized figures made of various materials, industrially manufactured enlarged dolls that had left the children’s room and entered public space. They imitate both the human body and social status, suggesting the accessibility of luxury that transcends social boundaries.

The mass presence of mannequins in display windows became a symbol and component of modern cities, first in great metropolises such as Paris and Berlin. Their presence was immediately embraced by photography and also permeated painting and film. Fascination with the mannequin is visible throughout nearly the entirety of avant-garde art commenting on modernity, including literature. It appears in the work of ideologically and stylistically distant writers such as Bruno Jasieński, portraying society in a futurist and direct manner in the catastrophic political drama The Ball of Mannequins (1931), and Bruno Schulz, who captured the surreal matter of the sensual world.

The short texts that make up Schulz’s Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies, or The Second Book of Genesis are fragments of a secondary Bible: excerpts describing the imperfection of a world created by humankind: “If they are to be human beings, then we shall give them, for instance, only one side of the face, one arm, one leg — namely the one they will need in their role. […] for every gesture a different actor,”⁶ and “[…] we wish to create man anew, in the image and likeness of the mannequin.”⁷

MAN-MACHINE⁸

In Schulz, we witness the culmination of a process of creating mechanical dolls that had begun already in the eighteenth century, when mechanically animated artificial figures were intended to become successful imitations of the human image and to imitate human actions with equal success. The term android emerged at that time to designate automatic dolls driven by mechanisms representing the most sophisticated development of clockwork technology. Such human automata were created, among others, by Pierre Jaquet-Droz together with his son Henri-Louis and Jean-Frédéric Leschot.

To this day, they remain among the most astonishing examples of the mechanical imitation of human activities. Their abilities, however, extended far beyond superficial imitation of gestures, mastering the arts of writing, drawing, and music-making. A family of such functioning androids from the Jaquet-Droz workshop is currently housed in a museum in his hometown of Neuchâtel. All of them demonstrate cultural activities previously considered the exclusive domain of human beings. The Musician — a female figure seated at a keyboard instrument — can perform several musical compositions. Seated beside her, the Draughtsman — a boy sketching portraits of the crowned heads of Europe with a quill pen — and the Writer, dipping a goose feather pen into an inkwell, can carefully inscribe letter by letter texts of up to forty characters stored in his mechanical memory. One of the sentences he writes begins with the words: “We are androids.”⁹

These and other similarly animated dolls, powered by spring, hydraulic, pneumatic, and eventually electrical mechanisms, remained popular in the following century. On the one hand, they testified to faith in reason, rationality, and the possibility of mastering the world through science and technical knowledge; on the other, they provoked discussions concerning the consequences of transgressing the laws of nature. Their existence strongly influenced the imagination of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although these constructions were intended for the courts of Europe and Japan, before reaching them they were displayed in public demonstrations. Under their influence, the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann made a mechanical doll the heroine of his story The Sandman (1817), later popularized by Léo Delibes’s ballet Coppélia and Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. There are also accounts suggesting that Mary Shelley herself saw androids before writing her famous novel Frankenstein (1818).

In these works, already far removed from Enlightenment rationalism, one finds clear anxieties about the creation of artificial life, and the warning against the consequences of imitating human beings became a recurring motif of popular culture.

The issue of imitating intelligent beings and programming life therefore appeared within broader discourse even before the arrival of the age of digital media, with its simulations of living organisms, communication networks, and promises of artificial intelligence.

VIRTUAL CREATIONS

New technologies become, once again, a field of art analyzing the relationship between human beings and the entities they themselves bring into existence. Eva and Franco Mattes are artists whose work significantly influenced the perception of new technologies as critical artistic tools. The subject of most of their works is the exploration, through art, of various cultural practices within the sphere of new media and the new economies connected to them. In the early 2000s, the digital environment of Second Life, which was then rapidly gaining popularity, became a central area of interest for both artists.

Second Life is a virtual world made available since 2003 free of charge (albeit only at a basic level), in which users, through self-created avatars, can lead active lives, participate in various events, and shape both their appearances and their relationships and situations. It is a three-dimensional online world that allows users, through their avatars, to establish contacts with the avatars of other users, thereby forming an active community within an alternative reality.

The Matteses decided to use Second Life to test the form of performance art. When performance art emerged at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, its earliest creators intended it to be free from objecthood — from understanding the artwork as a product or commodity. Instead, it was meant to offer a relationship established directly between the artist and an audience present within the same public space: a fleeting and unrepeatable relation created through the emanation of actions and physical co-presence. It was an action that proposed direct experience in place of an artwork, an experience that, once completed, would remain only in the memory of participants. In practice, however, performance art proved inseparable from the filmic and photographic documentation that preserved it, gradually transforming the status of the ephemerality of experience and enriching it through camera-oriented actions.

At the beginning of the 2000s, a new practice known as “reenactment” became widespread. It involved younger artists repeating classic performances from the 1970s by creators who had in the meantime achieved cult status, such as Marina Abramović and Ulay, Valie Export, or Chris Burden. The term reenactment, denoting the recreation of a past event, allowed artists to avoid terms criticized within the discourse of performance art for their theatrical associations — terms such as acting out, staging, or role-playing. Instead, it was intended to allow new energies to confront classical actions. Eva and Franco Mattes declared a rather critical attitude both toward performance itself and toward the strategy of reviving it through reenactment, as well as toward the phenomenon of Second Life itself. Through their new work, they sought both to engage with the potential of performance and to confront the reasons for their skepticism toward it. Their projects realized since 2007 under the title Synthetic Performances: Reenactment became pioneering attempts to transfer performance into the sphere of virtual networked reality and its online communities. They constituted a confrontation between the assumptions accompanying historical performance art and the reality of contemporary interpersonal relations established through networks. In a sense, this confrontation invalidated the earlier division between performative, scenic, and screen-based action. The Matteses chose to recreate performances from the 1970s particularly those in which the body had been used in a risky manner.¹⁰

CYBERHUMANISM

The relationship between the real body and technology (robotic, virtual, networked), its performative representation, and networked participation constitutes the subject of the artistic practice of Stelarc, for whom the human body can become a socially controlled organism — an automaton. Stelarc works primarily with his own body, which he considers obsolete and increasingly absent, and which, in order to preserve its humanity while simultaneously meeting new demands, must fill itself with technology and evolve alongside it. In Stelarc’s performance in Wrocław in 1997, the artist operated with a third hand connected to the brain, from which it received commands, while simultaneously surrendering half of his body to viewers who controlled its movements through computers and the internet. Within a single anatomy, a single biological body, the artist combined his biological reality with an avatar executing the will of other individuals. He demonstrated how impulses expressing the wills of different consciousnesses can coexist within the structure of one body without causing harm.

Through electronic muscle stimulation, the artist’s arms and legs unconditionally obey the commands of viewers; the performer becomes partly a puppet — an automaton whose limbs are manipulated by the audience. He demonstrates that the executor of commands transmitted through electrical impulses is neither a virtual avatar nor a mechanical robot, but a biological body. Stelarc maintains that his actions are not warnings about the future, but attempts to sharpen awareness of what we have already become.¹¹

Media are not merely extensions of our bodies; they also function in the opposite direction — the activity of our bodies becomes an extension of media. The artist’s stance is simultaneously radically rational and mad. We experience anxiety toward technologies that tune our physicality and consciousness, and humanity has long been haunted by fears of being forced into automatic activity, of blindly executing the will of others. Within the divided body, we can be both active and activated at once, guided by our own consciousness and manipulated externally like a puppet.¹²

TRANSHUMANISM

In Ken Feingold’s work, a talking head placed in a flowerpot might appear to be a Surrealist artwork were it not for the conversation resonating between it and a human being, simultaneously displayed on-screen as text. This work, Sinking Feelings, first presented in 2002, was entirely pioneering within the field of art employing artificial intelligence.

The animatronic structure of the head allows for eye movement and synchronization of lip movement with articulated sound. The head is capable not only of verbal expression, but also of listening to and analyzing what it hears, which enables its responses to operate through surprising associations, openness to free connections, and sarcastic humor. One senses in this work the presence of different mentalities — the human mentality of the viewer and the digital mentality of the machine. Their interaction is performative, dialogical, in a sense scenic, textual, and literary, while the course of the conversation develops into a dramaturgically compelling dialogue.

The head is a self-portrait of the artist, but the resemblance does not end there. The artificial intelligence program with which it has been equipped includes not only the ability to conduct coherent conversation, but also a specific style of speech, type of humor, and mode of argumentation, all intended to reproduce the artist’s psyche. The imitation therefore does not stop at physical resemblance, but reaches into the reproduction of intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual spheres. For this self-portrait, reproducing the artist’s surface appearance alone is insufficient. The experimental use of artificial intelligence serves here to create an artificial personality in which the author sought to reconstruct his own manner of feeling, speaking, and arguing.

The problem of linguistic communication with artificial intelligence is presented not merely as a question of recognizing content, but above all as communication between personalities, whose meanings and characters become the driving force behind constructed verbal narratives and shape the dialogue itself. It is thus an attempt to create a new narrative form, a narrative object that comes alive and expresses itself through verbal contact with the viewer.

In the slightly later work The Animal, Vegetable, Mineralness of Everything (2004), Feingold placed three animatronic heads engaged in dialogue with one another. All share the same physiognomy (again a self-portrait of the artist), yet possess different and non-human personalities: animal, vegetal, and mineral. These artificial intelligences are not built according to the model of the human mind, and therefore the dialogue they generate adopts a transhumanist perspective.

Artificial intelligence may also manifest itself in affective and characterological ways. In this context, it is worth recalling the sculptures of the contemporary American artist Jordan Wolfson, who employs advanced engineering techniques, programming, and artificial intelligence. His sculpture Colored Sculpture (2016) is a distant descendant of androids — an animatronic marionette fully computerized and equipped with cameras, facial recognition systems, and extensive memory modules. The figure, slightly larger than life-size, resembles at once the American cowboy puppet Howdy Doody, popular in the 1950s, the puppets known from horror films, and the famous rascal Huckleberry Finn. It is a figure simultaneously imprisoned and exposed by technology. Chained and manipulated through those very chains, it is dragged across the gallery floor, lifted into the air, or violently hurled against the ground. Subjected to violence before the eyes of spectators, it gazes around with a piercing stare expressing both torment and a desire for revenge. The artist himself emphasizes that the work is not about the convention of violence or the simulation of suffering. He states explicitly: “I use real physical violence against this figure.”¹³

Its purpose is to pull the audience out of their comfort zone, confronting them with the reality of inflicted suffering, the feeling of passive consent to such violence, and ultimately anxiety about their own safety.

Its eyes search for eye contact with individual viewers, approaching them whenever it identifies faces in its surroundings. Can the preservation of viewers’ faces within its memory constitute a danger? Combined with the digital traces we all leave behind, could it one day be used to track us? What if the marionette considered viewers complicit in the suffering inflicted upon it, freed itself, and sought revenge? Can artificial intelligence pose such a threat at all? Could a humiliated entity regard observing viewers as co-responsible for its humiliation? If traces preserved within its memory remain, should we fear deferred retaliation?

This spectacular performative installation generates genuine anxieties, drawing simultaneously upon ancient and contemporary fears of revenge that technical devices might exact upon humanity. It also invites reflection on the complex relationships between the viewer and art that abandons objecthood in favor of process. When the artwork becomes more an event and a relationship than a traditionally understood object, and when the boundaries of those relationships are no longer confined to the field of art alone, everything becomes profoundly ambiguous — just like the word “colored” in the title, which also evokes oppressed ethnic groups. Might artworks, like them, feel anger after centuries of objectification?

LOSS AND PRESERVATION. FROM HERMINE MOOS TO BINA48

Hermine Moos was a German puppeteer and painter who, in 1918–1919, created a life-sized rag doll at the request of the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. Abandoned by Alma Mahler, with whose departure after a turbulent relationship he could not reconcile himself for years, Kokoschka, following the advice of the famous neurologist Gerhard Pagel, commissioned Hermine Moos to create a doll resembling Alma. The doll was intended to “live” with the artist, to become a vehicle for preserved memory and a companion whose presence might alleviate pain and facilitate reconciliation with loss. The plan failed: the doll was returned because the figure of Alma, although created according to the artist’s sketches, disappointed his expectations and was ultimately rejected by him.

Similar stories occur today as well. At the request of Martine Rothblatt — biotechnology visionary, investor, one of the world’s most influential lawyers, and a transgender person — the humanoid robot BINA48 was created as a replica of her wife. Constructed by Hanson Robotics in 2010 and continuously improved ever since, BINA48 consists of a head and bust that function as a physical and psychological (intellectual and characterological, in principle) representation of Bina Aspen, now Rothblatt. Her statements, feelings, opinions, and memories are recorded, analyzed, and compiled by algorithms based on neural networks and machine learning. BINA48 is intended to reproduce her behavior and emanate her personality. In conversation, it is supposed to speak in the same manner, follow thoughts similarly, and employ the same forms of argumentation. In this way, a scanned personality is meant to function — permanently preserved beyond the biological person who served as its model. Its aim is to provide loved ones with the continued presence of a person immortalized within an intelligent sculpture. At present, BINA48 is publicly demonstrated and frequently participates together with its chief constructor Bruce Duncan in symposia devoted to various aspects of the future.