When Puppets Meet Machines

This issue was sparked by Deborah Hunt’s (Puerto Rico) experiments using AI as a design partner for her show Road of Useless Splendor. Her process, shared online, raised questions at the heart of this moment: how do we create, tell stories, and imagine futures in an age where humans, puppets, robots, and digital technologies increasingly share the stage?

From cinema and advertising to the studio and the rehearsal room, technology is reshaping how we work and how audiences experience performance.

The writers and artists gathered here consider:
• How AI is being integrated into artistic research and production,
• How digital tools are influencing aesthetics and stagecraft,
• How relationships among human, robotic, and hybrid bodies are evolving, and
• What ethical questions emerge as our entanglement with machines deepens.

A Furhat social robot head by Guojing92, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Contemporary AI robotics materializes the negotiation between human and nonhuman that puppetry has always understood.

We begin with Hunt’s “strange soup” of digital imaginaries—threads that run through three of her productions and continue to shape her work. From there, we travel to Kenya, Greece/Poland, the UK, and the US. Fedelis Kyalo traces puppetry’s growth in Kenya and envisions its technological future. Colette Searls examines Tarish “Jeghetto” Pipkins’s Hip Hopera of 5P1N0K10 and its provocative questions about human–robot relations. Roger Whiter reflects on decades of working with animation, puppetry, and automata. Chris Ignacio imagines the voice as avatar and expressive body. Laura Gates considers puppetry, monstrosity, and AI entanglement.

We also continue to foster new scholarship, including a peer-reviewed essay by Yucheng Peng and Yanna Kor on playwriting for and by machines. Our Who’s Who section features German artist Tilla Schmidt-Ziegler. Reviews include the book A Life in Shadows: Shadow Theatre in Southeast Asia and the touring exhibition New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations.

This issue asks how technology can unsettle, transform, and even expand puppetry’s possibilities while reminding us that puppetry has always negotiated the fine line between animate and inanimate. As we turn toward our next theme, Utopias and Worldmaking, we invite you to reflect, question, and imagine alongside us.

— Alissa Mello