Ali Momeni

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Tagged: street

telepuppet.tv

Posted October 30, 2014 & filed under .

 

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?”
The telepuppets then travelled to Iran and visited the sites that our immigrant friends missed

Telepuppets go to the Tehran Bazar
Telepuppets greet shop keepers
Telepuppet visits our friend’s favorite shop

Telepuppets come back to Liverpool to do a participatory public projection performance
Telepuppets come back to Brussels to do a participatory public projection performance
Telepuppets come back to Madrid to do a participatory public projection performance

Projections included the suite-case new station and live camera feeds
Telepuppets return to Iran
Telepuppets visit Persepolis!

Tags: Max, Performance, projection, public, puppets, street, Theater

About

Ali Momeni is into dynamic systems and moving targets; he works with kinetics, electronics, software, sound, light, people, plants and animals. His creative output ranges from sculptures and installations, to urban interventions and music theater performance. Read more here.

Contact

b a t c h k u at gmail dot com

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