Experiments in digital puppetry: Video hybrids in apple’s quartz composer

Abstract

Digital Puppetry is a hybrid art form that includes a broad range of creative practices. The current chapter explores real-time video montages and avatar control using wireless game controllers while exploring what is meant by the term digital puppet and raises issues surrounding the virtual and tangible body in performance. Real-time media objects are viewed as extensions to the human performer – sympathetic with the traditions and conventional definitions of puppetry. I document the workings of a prototype performance system made using Apple’s innovative and free development tool Quartz Composer. It encompasses screen-based digital puppetry and scenography, mixedreality video composites and custom software programming and the gestural control of an on-screen avatar using the popular game controller, the Nintendo Wii-remote.