Event Title

MA13 - Digital Puppetry: KENDRA Crab

Presenter Information

Lynn Tomlinson

Location

VAB-108

Streaming Media

Start Date

3-11-2017 4:45 PM

Description

KENDRA (Kinetically Engineered Networked Digitally Reactive Arthropod), the Digital Puppetry Crab is an animated character controlled by an iPad touch screen interface, allowing live interaction, improvisation, and the ability to rehearse and devise scenes, all things that the animation process doesn't usually allow. She is a modern update on Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, a character controlled live in real time, somewhat like a digital marionette, who can respond to, or mischievously disobey, commands and audience suggestions. The app and the subsequent performances were created through collaboration between new media artist and animator Lynn Tomlinson and puppetry artist Colette Searls, who worked with a team at UMBC's Imaging Research Center to create the iPad app. For Light City 2016, Baltimore's inaugural festival of lights, Tomlinson and Searls combined their digital puppet and street performance in Kendra's Bay, a short piece featuring an actor/Master of Ceremonies interacting in real time with audiences and the crab character Kendra, who is controlled by an experienced puppeteer at the back of the audience. In a fun, lighthearted way, Kendra's Bay points to the paradox of modern manufacturing of cheap goods in an era of environmental concern. It plays with the irony of how the plastic souvenirs and other cheap things we so casually acquire -- things we'll soon pass along or throw away -- are destined to permanently reside in overfilled landfills or in the environment. Kendra Crab is doing her best to clear the clutter in the bay, but her plight is overwhelming as she tries to throw things away: they can't biodegrade, and ultimately, there is no "away." Kendra has also appeared in a gallery exhibition, a puppet slam, and can be used as a tool to create short films. As an animated digital puppet, she has the appeal of a cartoon with the spontaneity of a live puppet. Tomlinson and Searls have collaborated for several years on the development of the digital puppet app at the root of this project. This project incorporates Lynn Tomlinson's unique clay-on-glass animation style and colorful collaged backgrounds with a digital interface programmed in Unity. Rather than using a full-body controller like the Kinect, the goal here was to create a puppet controlled by several fingers on both hands. The project is a colorful, playful, and innovative combination of tactile approaches and new media technologies, used to investigate the complex problem of the overproduction of plastic and its impact on the environment, as well as a means to begin investigating consumerism, hoarding, and other responses to the overproduction of cheap goods: Kendra the crab covets and gathers stuff – the odd cast-off detritus she finds in her underwater world.