Avatars

By: Matthew Battles
December 12, 2009

I’ve been reading the debate about James Cameron’s CGI magnum opus Avatar over at io9— which strangely reawakened an old puppetry hobbyhorse long dormant. And then I happened across this YouTube clip of a film describing the “kineman” puppets used in the making of Englebert Humperdinck’s Hansel & Gretel: An Opera Fantasy (1954). Created by Michael Myerberg, a Broadway producer with a colorful history, the puppets with their dials are striking steampunk avatars.

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Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Avatars

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