Animatronic Puppet Mania

The Creators Project: Why robotic puppets?
Ithai Benjamin: When I was a 8, I started making them. I loved doing it. Since I was a kid, I always made stuff and was playing music at the same time. I was looking for a way to combine the puppets with my music. They always had so much personality, but I always wanted them to talk. In my second year at ITP I was in a class called NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), and I was trying to build an instrument, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to try to turn them into robots, and have them kind of be my band.

How does the technology you put in the puppets work?
It’s midi-based. It’s pretty simple I mean. It’s servo-motors, each puppet has like 14 of them. And basically a board that understands midi-messages that are sent to it from a music sequencer and the board receives commands from the computer and tells the servo-motors how to move. It’s the same motors that are used in flying airplanes and miniature racecars.

Were there puppeteers or particular puppets that inspired you in the first place?
Andy Kaufman comes to mind because he was kind of a puppet. He had various alter-egos that he created. Like on his TV special, Tony Clifton the puppet comes down and he talks to it. I think Andy Kaufman would have done the same thing that I do now, like if it was easy to do back then. I feel like he did the same things that I’m trying to play with.

That sort of puts you in with artists, like Spike Jonze doing Where the Wild Things Are, of people who make children’s entertainment that is sophisticated enough for adults. Why drives you to incorporate sophisticated technology into toys that are for adults, not children?
I think there is something very satisfying to both creator and viewer in seeing something very simple do something very sophisticated. In my case, my puppets seem very simple, but their behavior is sophisticated in that they emulate humans through movement and sound. The technology is just being used as a means to an end. Most of my work uses technology to tell human stories.

There’s a lot happening in art and technology right now that has to do with things that were formally thought children’s entertainment like video games, being made for adults of our generation who grew up with these things as playthings but now don’t want to get rid of them and so want to think about them in new ways. What do you think new technology has to do with that mindset of play and the transition into taking playthings seriously?
This project incorporates everything I’ve always liked from growing up in the 80’s…I have a nostalgic soft spot for sing-alongs and stuff that I liked when I was a kid, you know, the muppets and sesame street and MTV. That combination of visual cheesiness with quality music appeals to me. I remember when I was 8 or 9 and I would watch Billy Idol’s, “White Wedding,” or something and — it’s ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous video but I loved it then. Today that video would never stand, but back then it was kind of accepted.

The way your puppets move and speak makes me think of Chuck E. Cheese. Did you go to Showbiz Pizza or Chuck E. Cheese growing up?
No that’s only something that I learned about at ITP when I started to make the puppets. I actually saw the documentary that came out not long ago, The Rockafire Explosion, about the guy who made them.

I admire the technology behind it which is kind of cool, I mean they did it so long ago, and for its time it was pretty sophisticated. It was all running off reel-to-reel tapes, and they had like 32 reel-to-reel tapes in the back room, it’s insane. Everything that I do, all the music I make, I send to my nephew whose like eight years old, and I tell my brother, “Ask him, ask him what he thinks.” Cause if I get approval from an eight year old and from and adult – like if I think it’s good and my nephew thinks it’s good then it’s kind of like I’ve passed a test.