There have been many exciting developments integrating new technologies with puppetry – from the machinima’s live manipulation and rendering of three-dimensional graphics found in the virtual puppetry of the Jim Henson Company’s Meet the Skrumps, to advances in robotics, like wireless servos responsible for the facial expressions of the puppets in Team America. Audiences have witnessed the combination of video and puppetry in the development of video ventriloquism (central in Evan O’Television’s cabaret acts), the use of video Foley tables in Cynthia Hopkins Accidental Nostalgia and most popularly, the use of live feeds, otherwise known as “I-MAG”. In puppetry, I-MAG, an abbreviation for “image magnification”, involves creating a live feed of all a performance captured with video camera and viewed simultaneously on a monitor or projection screen. In this paper, I will be exploring the use of I-MAG in contemporary puppet theatre – excavating its roots and looking at its evocative range such as uncanny doubling, changes in scale, cinematic effects, economy of space, and a reframing of the proscenium).
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