This Psychedelic Puppet Show Might Just Save Us from the Clutches of Big Data

Quintron and Miss Pussycat, the musical performance duo from New Orleans, are connoisseurs of obscurity. Their unique live shows, a combination of homebrew instrumentation and other-worldly puppetry, have earned them fans in odd places and taken them, most recently, to the Kennedy Center. They also make films — puppet films, of course — and their newest, "The Mystery in Old Bathbath," which has its New York debut this Thursday, is their finest, weirdest thing yet.

An intoxicating blend of avant-garde psychedelia, off-beat humor and artful puppeteering, the film itself is largely the work of Miss Pussycat. Her permanent collaborator Quintron provides assiduous musical accompaniment and crisp, lush photography, which adds another dimension, mystifying the sense of perspective and putting the polish on surreal atmospherics.

In addition to her feline name, Miss Pussycat goes by Panacea Theriac, which comes from ancient Greek. (Panacea is a healing herb or universal remedy, and Theriac is the power of the remedy to heal the wounds caused by wild beasts, such as serpents.)

Here are a few things I gleaned during a recent phone call, while she was at a gas station somewhere between Atlanta and Washington D.C.: she grew up on a farm in Antlers, Oklahoma, where she watched her favorite cow, Shazam, get killed for meat (she's now a vegetarian); it was her father's paintings that first piqued her interest in art; their beauty, over and above the work of famous painters, taught her that good art has nothing to do with being fashionable.

"I love art," she said, "but I hate the art world."

Some art emphasizes the extroverted task of creating a spectacle to awe the audience into a glazed state of celebrity worship. Miss P's puppet shows, with their playful humor and fearless portrayal of private mythology, call the audience to share in a wealth of personal, sometimes indecipherable treasures. The plot revolves around the exploits of Trixie and the Tree Trunks, who travel to the spa town of Bathbath to revive the sickly Happy Tree. Along the way they discover a spirit world and help the world's greatest jazz drummer, the warlock JJ Suede, find himself.

"Kill the Witch, Steal the Paintings, Burn Down the Museum."

From January through May of 2010, Quintron and Miss Pussycat did a long-term installation at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Miss Pussycat put her lifetime of puppet-making on display, and Quintron set up in a wing of the museum to record the album Sucre Du Sauvage. But being on display can be tiresome and distracting, both agreed, and the demands of coping with an endless parade of onlookers threatened to take away from the attention afforded the making of art.

In order to get his work done on the album, which turned out to be a masterpiece—it combines his signature raucous psychedelic noise with a more pervasive melodic bent—Quintron took to using the museum recording space at night when no one was there. He played background white noise during the day to create a sonic barrier between himself and observers.

Miss P said that by having 24-hour access to the museum, she was able to see all the art that lies hidden in museum storage. For whatever reason, these pieces don't get the fame of being on display, but that doesn't take away from their true value, she said. In "Mystery in Old Bath Bath," she reveals that the most precious things in life are the secret treasures of the heart, and these do not count on traffic as the measure of their worth.

She also described how a master puppeteer can transform a clipping from a potato chip bag into a dramatic prop. As a puppeteer creating imaginary characters who lead the receptive audience to a purifying spirit world of Bath Bath, Miss P provides a remedy against the poisonous beast of commercialized art. As more and more cultural experiences enter the commercial realm on account of the contagion of being for display online, the premium on artists like Miss P and Mr. Q, who trade directly in their own coinage of personalism will continue t rise.

What's uncanny about Q and P's NOMA installation is the way it stands as a metaphor for the plight of the modern social media user. While logging into sites like Google, Facebook or Twitter grants access to an Ali Baba's hoard of information, it also snatches up the user for display in the Museum of Big Data. User data becomes the basis for advertising revenue.

In a way, this mass transfer of cultural information into the hands of marketers makes the purely personal appreciation of art more elusive. People crave the rare pleasures of the accidental find. With the combined forces of big data conspiring to orchestrate online experience by leveraging user preferences, accidents become priceless.

"Total disclosure is the new privacy," as Mr. Quintron put it over the phone. He may be right. But the duo's work puts a stake firmly in the swampy ground for the hidden things too, the stuff that can't be seen or easily captured by regimes of big data, the hidden treasures. Sometimes we need puppets to show us the world as it actually might be.

Quintron and Miss Pussycat's new movie, The Mystery in Old Bathbath, will screen on Thursday April 18th, at 8pm, at The Anthology Film Archive in New York City.

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