Title：Transmissionaries
Date：2025/11/21 15:40-17:00
Location：R103, CSIE
Speakers：Professor Hajoe Moderegger, Chair of the Art Department at the City College of New York
Host：洪一平教授
Abstract:
Over the past year, the artist duo eteam conducted research in Taiwan as Fulbright Scholars, exploring the tools, rituals, and storytelling techniques of both historical and contemporary puppet performance. Along the way, they uncovered surprising parallels between digital handheld communication devices, such as smartphones, and their analog counterparts—hand puppets. Both serve as intimate extensions of the human body and tools of storytelling, performance, and communication.
“Transmissionaries” is a performative lecture that draws its captivating energy from the intersection of these discoveries with the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence—particularly Large Language Models (LLMs)—and the ancient art of Budaixi, or traditional Taiwanese hand puppetry. Deeply rooted in Taiwan’s cultural fabric, puppet shows are often locally specific, created in response to the needs and traditions of particular communities or temples. Each performance is a dialog not just with the gods deities, but with the local histories, dialects, and values of the place in which it is staged.
Eteam's category-defying, time-zone-shifting presentation explores those connections and highlights how the generative methods of LLMs mirror the narrative strategies of traditional puppeteers, who—like AI systems trained on massive datasets—rely on vast stores of internalized narrative stock (novels, films, daily observations), recursive patterning, and the remixing of formulaic expressions to invent, improvise and perform new stories night after night.
In traditional Taiwanese culture, long and elaborate puppet shows are not staged merely for human amusement—they are offerings, performed for gods and deities residing in temples. This raises provocative questions about the nature of audiences: Who is watching? Who is being addressed? These questions resonate with today’s digital performances on social media, where content is simultaneously intimate, performative, and often algorithmically observed.
Where do trust, authorship, skill and creativity reside in our collaborations with our tools and devices? And who, or what, constitutes the audience in this unfolding performance—humans, deities, social-media algorithms, AI-training datasets, history? In drawing lines from ancient puppet stages to contemporary smartphone screens, we ask: Is AI the future of all audiences? What does that future ask of us—as storytellers, as users, and as humans? This talk invites reflection on the evolving relationship between humans and the tools we build to communicate, create and make meaning.
Biography:
Hajoe Moderegger is an artist and professor for emerging media, currently serving as chair of the Art Department at the City College of New York. Franziska Lamprecht is an artist and independent researcher. Since 2001, Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger have collaborated as eteam, an interdisciplinary artist duo recognized for their conceptual approach to digital media, installation art, and community-driven projects. eteam's works have been shown internationally at the International Film Festival Rotterdam or the legendary NY Video Festival and institutions such as MoMA PS1, Whitney Museum of American Art, Sculpture Center NY, Centre Pompidou Paris, MuMOK Vienna. They received commissions to create new works for the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, Art in General, Culver Center of the Arts Riverside CA, Eyebeam NY and FACT Liverpool, Britain. They could not have done this without the generous support of a Creative Capital Award and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, NYSCA, NYFA, Rhizome, CLUI, Taipei Artist Village, Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, the City College of New York, Hong Kong Baptist University and the Fulbright Program, among many others. Their novel “Grabeland” was published with NightboatBooks in February 2020.