A hybrid lecture-performance and participatory workshop exploring how we project humanity onto nonhumans, and how masks, puppets, and animated characters shape our sense of self and world. The project weaves theory, film examples and audience-puppetry to move from classic anthropomorphism toward “ecomorphism”: relating to animals, objects, and systems on their own terms rather than domesticating them into human ideals.
Participants are invited to make simple sock puppets to then experiment with voice ownership, role swaps, and fourth-wall breaks to feel how identity co-emerges between mask and wearer. The lecture will be about suspension of disbelief and uncanny presence. References range from Disney, Gille Deleuze, Sergej Eisenstein, Donna Haraway, and Paul Wells to stop-motion material resistance and game worlds like Katamari or Everything, that explore relation over domination.
Anthropomorphism vs ecomorphism, mask as code and persona, animism, the uncanny, ethics of representation, AI’s simulated “aliveness,” and the use of cuteness and stereotype in animation.
Researching how belief, empathy, and projection are constructed in animation and puppetry.
Practice decentering the human gaze through material play.
Reflect on identity as performance and relation rather than essence.
It will be a playful, critical laboratory that shifts viewers from consuming representations to co-creating relations—trading sanitized spectacle for the vivid, sometimes difficult aliveness of making and being made.
