projection

Since 2007, I have been working on a variety of instruments and vehicles for participatory and interactive projection performance. This instruments focus on live-camera feeds and drawings as inputs, and are mobile/portable and battery powered. They include tricycles, bikes, carts, cases, baskets, tables and more. The bulk of this work is described and analyzed in my book A Manual for Urban Projection.

: Projection Tricycle

: Projection Tricycle in action

: Projection Bike

: Projection Bike in action

: Projection Pack

: Projection Pack in action

: Story-Booth (S-Booth)

: Story-Booth (S-Booth) in action

: Drawing-Case (D-Case)

: Drawing-Case (D-Case) in action

: Projection Basket (P-Basket)

: Projection Basket (P-Basket) in action

: Networked Drawing Table

: Networked Drawing Table in action

: Mobile Projection/Drawing Jib

: Mobile Projection/Drawing Jib in action

: Mobile Projection/Drawing Stage

: Mobile Projection/Drawing Roller

: Mobile Projection/Drawing Roller in action

: Projection Truck

: Projection Truck in action

: Mobile Projection Cart

: Mobile Projection Cart in action

Transnational migration is to be among the most complex global issues of our time promises to only expand its scope in the coming decades. telepuppet.tv is a crowd-sourced storytelling platform that combines augmented-puppetry with on-line image sharing and urban projection performance. telepuppet.tv employs the technologies, idioms and aesthetics of TV News to interweave stories about the experience of immigration, with orchestration conversation and choreography in public space.telepuppet.tv works in several steps: from puppet interview, to international travel and memory re-enactment, to live puppet and projection street performance. This process aims to catalog and connect experiences of immigration across time and space on our planet, and to create empathetic encounters with strangers.

telepuppet.tv consists of a three layered platforms for storytelling:

a crowd-sourced platform for gathering immigrant stories from the perspective of two puppets with eyes (camera) and ears (microphone) who are shipped around the world
a live-performance platform for storytelling in public space with a mobile puppet theater that incorporates urban video projection
a cloud-based platform for cataloging and broadcasting stories as live streams, or edited off-line episodes.
The project will be experienced as a live mobile puppet theater that uses architectural projection to share stories gathered abroad; the project will also build and ongoing Time Machine of stories, available online.

telepuppet.tv will be developed in two phases; Phase one was completed in October of 2014 with a series of live public performances in Europe. The second phase will expand the platform into a crowd-sourced ecosystem of low-cost personalized puppets that interconnects a community to a global online social network.

: A puppet for Ali and another for Nima

: The puppets are equipped with cameras and wireless video transmitters

: Ali’s puppet is a reporter

: Nima’s puppet is the newsman

: Ali’s puppet interviewed Iranian refugees in Brussels, Liverpool and Madrid, asking them “Where would you go if you could go back to Iran right now?”