9/12/2018 - PEER RESPONSES + FEEDBACK - PUPPETS EVALUATION

By this time I've had the puppets in my house for quite some time, and they have been produced at various occasions as something for guests visiting the house to get involved with, which I have also taken as some opportune market research for how interactions between the puppets and audiences can be staged.

It is not uncommon for us to host guests at our house and as we only really have a lovely living room and a selection of bedrooms, and without TV, we have a selection of different inventive ways to keep things interesting with lots of people in a single space such as a selection of nerf guns scattered around ready to be discovered and used. The puppets have now come to form part of that, especially when music is playing, due to the way we realised they could captivate a whole room and completely lift the atmosphere at any time.

People seem to enjoy both watching and operating the puppets in equal measure, although felt a certain unwillingness to use them for too long incase something should happen to them as of course at this stage they are still somewhat delicate. However this will of course be ironed out in later realizations. When operated well in time to upbeat music, it was not uncommon for conversation to cease and the entire room become beguiled with watching the characters. It was interesting also how people began to assign personhood and character to the simplistic dinosaur forms, using terms such as 'little guy' and gender pronouns such as he and she to begin to describe them, and associating life to their movements.

Here I have attached a video of three friends playing with the puppets after an evening making sushi. The velociraptor had become slightly damaged at this point, yet even with impared movements Bridget, the puppeteer, still assigned personhood to the being; mimicing a voice and suggesting his sadness at the loss of his leg, even naming him. Of course these interactions are in jest, but it is a genuine interaction, and illustrates that in just a few small leaps of association, a careful combination of string, tinfoil and plastecine suddenly became imbued with percievable self-awareness and autonomy, and audiences experiencing an encounter with external non-human personhood.

This quote from 'Humans and Other Animals - Cross Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions' by Samantha Hurn is important when considering the way in which these experiences of non-human personhood can help build understanding and awareness of the behaviours of other beings.

'Many anthropologists have been ‘forced’ to re-think constructivism as a result of their contact with other peoples who do not attribute personhood, but rather perceive it, because in their interactions with animals the personhood of these nonhuman others is revealed in no uncertain terms (Milton, 2005; Willerslev, 2007: 20). So in cases where humans are free from the constraints imposed by a particular world view which sets humans apart from animals or where they make a decision – consciously or otherwise – to reject it, the behaviours of other animals can be observed and interpreted in much the same way that humans observe and interpret the behaviours of members of their own species. Admittedly this is also a constructivism of sorts, as within certain cultures the recognition of personhood is part of the dominant world view!'