Digital puppetry [Balli Plastici] & Digital Toolkit [Toybox Futuristi]
Depero Futuristi, 2009

This January, time opens up a parallel year. The year 2010 as envisioned a hundred years ago is coming alive as another futuristic idea. The Italian artists Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini praised movement and speed of machinery and expressed it through their paintings and sculptures.  In 1910 they announced the ‘futurist manifesto’. In their famous quote “a running horse has not four legs, but twenty”, they express movement of time by combining what we can see now with things already present in our memory.
In the futurist manifest the poet Marinetti writes in 1901 “a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace”. Italy’s rapid changes due to the industrialization before World War I created a vision of the future based on an aesthetic pioneer spirit. The art expressed a culture of speed and machines. Futurism is the pursuit of total arts. This includes the pursuit of literature, art, drama, music, photography, movie, stage arts, architecture, and advertisement in general. At the same time, futurism is destroying ideas of what art was before.
With this spirit of futurism, digital puppetry, ‘Balli Plastici’ (the plastic dance), is produced by the Depero Futuristi team from Carnegie Mellon University. Fortunato Depero, a core artist in futurism, designed futuristic ballet puppetry. Actors and actresses can be substituted with a marionette and it can dance like machinery. The Marionette produced by Fortunato Depero is converted to a ‘digital marionette’ which has versatile characters and movements. The backdrops can be changed into new imaginary stages made by Ballit Plastici. Ballit plastici is made with a digital toolkit (toybox futuristi) with which anyone can create their own futuristic puppetry. Puppetry is reborn as live art which can draw constant audience attention.


Dates  2010.01.04 - 2010. 02.26
(8:30 a.m. - 9:00p.m., closed on weekends and holidays)
Venue  Seoul COMO tower ( SKT-tower, exit gate 4 of Euljiro subway station) 입장료: 무료
Organized by  art center nabi, SK Telecom
Program Partner  ETC
Contact  02-2121-1030
 


< Balli Plastici>, Fortunato Depero, 1917
In 1917, Fortunato Depero began to conceive of a Futurist ballet in which machine-like puppets would replace human actors and dancers.  He felt that this would emphasize the Futurist ideals of technology advancing and breaking free of human influence.
A year later, Depero had created a collection of marionettes and set designs.  He worked with a variety of composers to arrange existing and new pieces of music for each different act of his show.  Balli Plastici was performed eleven times, and though it was considered novel, its reception was lukewarm.Eventually the original puppets were destroyed.  It wasn’t until 1981 that a revival showing of the ballet required a reconstruction of the puppets according to Depero’s paintings, sketches and photographic evidence.  These puppets are now on display at Casa Museo Depero in Rovereto, Italy.  There are no records of the Balli Plastici production itself aside from scant notes in Depero’s own journals.



Artist

Fortunato Depero(1982~1960)
Born in 1892, Fortunato Depero was welcomed into the core of the Futurist movement in 1915, after exhibiting a series of drawings inspired by Boccioni’s sculptures. He was an extremely talented and multifaceted artist, and his works span the realms of painting, sculpture, set and costume design, typography and advertisement.
After releasing Depero-Dinamo Azari in 1927, a book known for being bound with bolts and which showcased his talent for graphic design and advertisement, he moved to New York, becoming the first – and only – Italian Futurist to move to the United States. While in the United States he would design front covers for publications such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
Depero spent the rest of his life between Italy and New York, working primary in the fields of painting and advertisement. In 1957, three years before his death, he organized the creation of the Galleria Permanente e Museo Depero in Rovereto, Italy – an institution devoted to preserving and displaying his work and that of other Futurists and which today contains over 3000 paintings and drawings, as well as over 7500 manuscripts relevant to Futurism

Depero Futuristi
Depero Futuristi is a student team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center re-imagining Balli Plastici, the ‘plastic dance’ created by Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero in 1918. The marionettes used in the dance encapsulate the Futurist ideal of machinery striving to break free of human control. Our goal is to digitize Depero’s puppets and develop a toolkit anyone can use to create their own Futurist-inspired ballets. Our efforts will move the marionettes beyond mere appreciation, propelling them continually forward as living art.

Team Members

         


                   


         


Faculty Advisors