HAND-HELD THEATER: Experiments in Gestures of the Digital
Editor: Jiani Wang
Our tactile lives have become strangely screen-shaped. We increasingly encounter the material world as something flattened and interpreted by our devices. But even inside these highly mediated systems where screens, interfaces, and platforms flatten sensation, we tell stories about who we are and how we see the world around us. Through them, we create narratives and micro-narratives using gestures, glitches, shared images, or by moving through digital space. This behavior comes from a long line of activities rooted in combining hand-held gestures, techniques, and devices used to express ourselves. This essay is inspired by my conversation with the New York-based artist duo eteam (Franzy Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) following the lively presentation at Roundabouts Now, an artist-run gallery in Kingston, NY, during the summer of 2025, of their most recent research and creative experiments. In this work, they ask: What forms of knowledge do hands hold, release, or disguise when mediated by tools? What does traditional puppetry teach us about storytelling in the digital age and emerging age of AI?
eteam, Digitus, 2025 (performance still)
Eteam’s practice unfolds across geographies, communities, technologies, and mediums as video works, interactive web pieces, performances, radio plays, and more. Their projects entail deep research, interaction, and close observation, leading to unexpected connections and discoveries of overlooked infrastructures and insights into how humans relate to one another, to machines, and to the more-than-human world. In their most recent work, they explore the resonances between traditional Taiwanese puppetry, budaixi (布袋戲), and contemporary hand-held technologies. Supported by Fulbright research in Taiwan, their exploration takes the form of a conceptual and cultural excavation. Their work has me contemplating our understanding of the digital, the tactile, and, moreover, the versatility and expressive power of the human hand and its storytelling tools.
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” — Donna Haraway[1]
“As Chomsky has proven, language enables an individual who inhabits it to generate an infinite number of sentences—this is the positive freedom of expression provided by our acceptance of the rules of language.” — Slavoj Žižek[2]
With this in mind, the body, expression, and the symbolic are entangled in the digital, and this term’s multiple applications resemble the versatility of language. Examining the similarities between them offers rich territory for bridging the past and the present and the personal and the collective. It also encourages us to look beyond the appearance of novelty in the digital age to make sense of how we arrived at this moment of increased tactile displacement. While today steering wheels turn themselves, texts appear without handwriting, and screens respond to swipes and collected data more than gestures of craft, at the same time, we may wonder whether these abstractions are that different from the hand-made gestures that precede them. eteam turned their attention to hand puppet theater as a starting point for this hypothesis.
eteam with 李奕賢 Li Yi-Hsien, The Rrringing, 2025 (performance still)
The discourse of technology often insists on a distinct rupture marking epochal shifts and the transformation of daily life. These myths claim the sudden arrival of AI, the collapse of attention, or the end of human creativity. But change, as eteam reminds us, unfolds incrementally, like the growth of a living creature. Kevin Kelly’s notion of the “technium”, technology as a self-organizing system that evolves in ways analogous to biology, serves as a point of reference. The idea here is that each innovation emerges from an environment of prior tools, infrastructures, and practices. In this sense, technologies do not create discrete breaches in the way of things, rather usher and participate in a broader process of co-evolution. The smartphone can thus be seen as an heir to puppetry, not in a direct lineage but as part of a shared technium of handheld media. The continuity between them lies in their functional resonance rather than any physical resemblance. Both devices stage performances; both mediate between humans and the more-than-human; and both enact gestures of control and surrender.
Still, the connection between hand puppetry and smartphones is unexpected and requires significant unpacking. Eteam’s research-driven endeavor takes us on a journey through time, geography, and thought to illustrate how the familiar digital logics of everyday computing via handheld devices, which are entangled with the body, human memory, and the public sphere, are also present in puppet theater. They approach their task through not only deep research but also interviews, observation, collaboration, and interpretation to consider the role of the hand across these different modes as a transmitter of knowledge, tradition, and a capacity for epic and endlessly iterative storytelling. They gather and reflect on the ways that disparate modes of communication and expression share infrastructures and cultural practices. Unsurprisingly, one of their first points of entry is through language, such as contemplating how the meaning, both in traditional Chinese and in English, of the words “creating” and “generating” depends on context and nuance. Making something from nothing and establishing the parameters for something new to arise from existing things are both sets of conditions which are entangled in all modes of storytelling, from poetry and verbal recitation to generative AI (GenAI) tools.
Stories are composites built from many things: existing narratives, remembered fragments, inherited traditions, speculative projections, and audience interactions. They connect the teller and recipient through a network of reference, recall, and imagination, continuously offering new points for stories to begin and thus never truly end. To this point, eteam’s research led to the discovery of a particular impromptu style of puppetry requiring the puppeteer to generate stories and actions mined from the consumption and memory of hundreds of existing tales and characters. This type of embodied generative remix happens in real time, revealing the magnificent abilities of the human computers that we are. This example offers another contextual reference for the multiplicity of digits, showing how our own processing system of data acquisition, storage, understanding, and retrieval resembles the prosthetic processing systems we build. Eteam keeps the bridge between human and creative system handy as a throughline across their examination of puppet theater. One might more readily recognize how digital performance on a handheld device plays with the slippage between digit-as-finger and digit-as-code, but they recognize how this operation is also at work in puppet theater. This idea is fleshed out in collaborative performances in which traditional Taiwanese hand puppets interact with digital devices.
On the small stages of budaixi, an entire world is expressed as a condensed drama. Heroes, villains, gods, spirits, and ordinary people are expressed as delicately hand-crafted glove puppets made of finely carved wood and ornately decorated cloth. Their individuality comes to life through stylized and choreographed movement, carefully timed and executed to maximize precision. A richly modulated vocal performance and sound effects form a combination that extends beyond realism and maintains a capacity for immersion. Characters who exit the stage leave in an almost imperceptibly swift escape through a cut-out, resembling the craft of a seamless edit in filmmaking. In their collaborative experiments with master puppeteers, eteam introduces TV screens and hand-held digital devices into the puppet world. Their staged encounters illustrate a mix between a playful rendezvous and a combative duel between two unlikely players. But as much as they reflect comically different forms in a jarring juxtaposition between the smooth bodies of smartphones and screens and the hand-made products of a centuries-old practice, their meetings also reveal their similarities.
According to this logic, hand movements and puppetry can be seen as a proto-programming language and a kind of embodied computation through gesture representing the physicality of touch and movement as the basis of narrative. A puppet, like a smartphone, is both an interface and a stage. It represents as well as embodies the invisible labor of hands, which remain partially hidden from an audience. This sleight of hand is a form of animation without a visible animator, speech without a speaker. In this sense, puppetry prefigures both computer automation and algorithm and is perhaps an inspiration for their formation. In eteam’s experiments, the jarring arrival to the stage of a smartphone—with its smooth body made of plastic and silicon-infused glass and a charging cord intact—interrupts the self-contained world of budaixi. The smartphone’s appearance forces a strong visible contrast to the human-like hand puppets, but the visible hand holding the device is a reminder of their shared similarities. Without the human hand, each expressive tool, whether smartphone or hand puppet, would remain inactive. We are reminded that the puppet’s costume and choreography form a different kind of artificial shell that partially hides the hand that operates it. In this pairing, we are also reminded that what appears autonomous in the digital realm often masks the presence of hired, borrowed, or hidden hands and their labor. Smartphones, too, are theaters in the palm of the hand and the products of the contributions of many hidden hands. The gestures of swiping, scrolling, and tapping echo the ritual movements of puppeteers. They are precise, practiced, performative, and repeated. And just as traditional puppet theaters mediate stories of gods, heroes, and spirits, today’s feeds mediate ideas of selfhood, community, and belonging. Posting is itself a performance, where the human hand offers up fragments of the soul or spirit, inspired by the conventions formed by the collective style and tone of other posters, and sent into the faceless algorithmic ether we call our audience.
eteam with 李奕賢 Li Yi-Hsien and 林慧盈 Winnie Lam, Audition, 2025 (performance still)
In one instance of eteam’s work, two puppets are called to dance before a strange audience made up of multiple devices arranged in a composition that resembles a traditional Christian altarpiece. A triptych is formed by a cloaked CRT monitor showing a pair of lips in close-up as the main “panel”, which is flanked by two smartphones framing a pair of eyes. Beneath the monitor is a kind of predella, a fourth “panel” made of a pair of (live) human hands operating a third smartphone. Digital lips move in near-perfect human simulation and AI-inflected human eyes unnaturally blink with exaggerated rapt attention to the puppets’ performance. This gathering of disembodied hands, eyes, and voice visualize the kind of global theater we enact in our everyday experiences online as audience members, virtual witnesses, and followers. Here the puppets engage in a kind of TikTok dance, momentarily dispensing with tradition in favor of indulging in internet vernacular. Altogether, the scene humorously offers commentary on the ways that storytelling takes shape through personal digital devices and networked environments and proposes the idea of a newfangled deity in the form of a disembodied audience to whom such offerings are made.
eteam with 李奕賢 Li Yi-Hsien and 張家銘, Or Wusong fights the icon, 2021 (video still)
What eteam stages are sometimes a comparison and other times a collision. In one experiment, titled “Wu Song Fights the iPhone”, a puppet and a smartphone battle. In this staged drama, the 13th century folktale hero Wu Song fights and overpowers a tiger before a smartphone appears on stage like a final boss. It isn’t long before the mythical hero and the screen lock in an anachronic struggle for attention and meaning. After a tense build-up, the smartphone is taken down by the warrior’s clever maneuvering to finally unplug the unruly device. This activates the smartphone’s screen to emit a comically final flickering of horizontal lines before fading to black in defeat. This playful scuffle doesn’t suggest a hierarchy or preference for the more mature storytelling form, rather it encourages us to experience the two of them in a new context. In such a face-off, the puppet and smartphone appear more as equals: two hand-held devices capable of theater in the palm of one’s hand. These staged encounters reveal the ways expression and storytelling are passed down from one system to another, and how this continues to evolve, even as new tools of language enter the scene.
Though seemingly unconnected to any tradition, large language models (LLMs) inherit this principle, though in distorted form. They internalize vast archives of human text and regurgitate them as new creations. This resembles our own duality as both storyteller and remixer. Human storytelling, whether through puppet theater or social media, operates through remix, improvisation, reiteration, and adaptation. What distinguishes the AI storyteller, however, is its lack of embodied memory. It doesn’t carry the messiness of lived experience or the relational stakes of address. Its stories lack the residue and weight of the hand. But again, the analogy to puppetry here is useful. A puppet only comes to life when the puppeteer’s hand animates it with intention, rhythm, and precision. Without this embodied relation, it’s inert and life-less. We may try to hide it, but without this relation to some kind of lived gesture, any story risks becoming a hollow performance. The philosophical stakes lie in how we understand this relation. Do we see ourselves as outsourcing creativity to tools, or as creating with and through them? Do we treat AI as an audience, archive, or collaborator? And how do we account for the cognitive debt, such as the erosion of embodied skill, memory, and attention that accompanies such outsourcing?
eteam with 李奕賢 and 林慧盈, The hand that went out into the world to learn how to tell stories, work in progress (still from single channel video, 80 min)
Another way to think about this relation is by contemplating how these media extend human capacities for storytelling, expression, and thought. What can puppets do that humans can’t? As previously described, puppets extend the hand into movements of precise choreography. This hidden activity is puppetry’s programming language. When we peel back the layer that hides the hand, that language is revealed. Another eteam experiment illustrates the gloveless hand via wireframe drawings to reveal the skeletal network that lies beneath. Hands move and wave while corresponding lines dance and intersect, showing the mechanical ballet of disciplined movement required for the puppeteer to transmit stories as much as embodied knowledge of gesture and rhythm. From this, we could say that puppets extend the hand, allowing it to animate stories beyond its own body, just as our digital lives are not confined to the screen or the cloud. Hand-held digital devices depend on a different kind of embodied knowledge of swiping, scrolling, uploading, and sharing. Neither function autonomously, despite their hidden systems and hands.
Eteam’s work invites us into a space of contemplation, where puppets and smartphones, rituals and social media feeds, and mythologies and algorithms are placed in dialogue with one another. Rather than juxtapose the old and new, they weave together different forms of storytelling to demonstrate unexpected relationships between disparate artforms and technologies. Their research, collaborations, and artistic experiments encourage us to pause and recognize the hand’s digits, gestures, and dexterity and recognize the digital as a site of multiplicity. The hand is anchored in the body and its gestures, but it is also an agent of abstraction, encoded and hidden as it is in the language of hand puppetry. The delicate manipulation of a puppet by hand is now remediated as the tactile swiping across a touchscreen. In both examples, the hand reminds us of the entangled relationship between the material and the symbolic, between physical presence and mediation. This work reminds us that the act of storytelling is an equally ancient ritual and a product of everyday life and resists forming value judgments using easy binaries between past and present, analog and digital, and myth and code.
The digital’s embodied past points to the hand as the original site of computation and meaning-making. The digital is always corporeal and computational, communication and expression. Hand puppets, hand-held digital devices, and language itself are as artificial as they are intimate and natural through the stories we create and tell. The hand puppet and the smartphone fit in the palm of one’s hand. Both are technological, spiritual, and performative. They hold the stages on which the stories extracted from memory play out. With just a few gestures of the digits, an entire drama can unfold to shape belief, frame memory, animate bodies (human and nonhuman), and guide us toward imagining and expressing the histories and the myths we inherit and the new ones we invent.
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[1] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press 2016), 12.
[2] Slavoj Žižek, Surplus Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 88.
[3] Benjamin Peters, “Digital,” in Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society & Culture, ed. Benjamin Peters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 99.