Adventures in Toyland by Edith King Hall (1900)

Source.

Magic (1978)

The Monster (1903)

Jim Henson's Wilkins Coffee Commercials

via Adrianne Kulling.

Puppets at the Canadian Museum of Civilization

Go see.

"Maelzel's Chess-Player" (1836) by Edgar Allan Poe

In full.

Second Life

• What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned? - Laura E. Hall - The Atlantic

Some discussion of Economics 2.0 (i.e. the virtual economy of this massive multiplayer video game now having real world application): 

• Second Life Founder Pursues Second Chance (Feb 3, 2014) - Re: Philip Rosedale's new startup, High Fidelity.
• Wildcat Banking in the Virtual Frontier. (Feb. 5, 2008)
• The Coming Second Life Business Cycle (Aug. 2, 2007)
• The Virtual Rockefeller (Dec. 2005). 
• Wikipedia entry
• c/f Second Life Maretplace: Where users buy pixilated commodities, for real world cash.

 "This player plays with wind chimes and lights off some fireworks."

 

Second Life Movie 2 

"A couple players line up for a picture."

Second Life Movie 3 
"The group moves on to play a game of darts." 

Second Life Movie 4
"You can become a DJ for other players to dance to."

Second Life Movie 5
"Your house can be decorated any way you want."

Second Life Movie 6
"With just a few clicks, a couple of players build a simple house and even find time to wallpaper it."

Second Life Movie 7
"You can create your new animations and then import them into the game."

Second Life Movie 8    
"Everyone gets down with their elaborate dance moves in a user-made nightclub."

Lotte Reigner

I asked Shary Boyle to suggest some titles of animation to pursue. From the first few seconds on: breathtaking. For a biography of silhouette animator and film director Lotter Reigner, see Wikipedia.

Other Films by Lotte Reigner
Papageno |(1935)
Hansel and Gretal (1955)
The Three Wishes (1955)
Jack and the Beanstalk (1955)

The Uncanny Valley - Masahiro Mori (1970)

Source.

See also: Japan child robot mimicks infant learning
Singing robotic head reads music

Grand Guignol: Resources, Film, Texts

Meaning "Giant Puppets," pulp genre horror owes a great deal to this early 20th C French, live action schlock theater, as does the furnishings of the carnival fun-house and our contemporary sense of the eerie, gory and the macabre. For a history and some cultural context, GrandGuignol.com has a lot of helpful articles and links to resources online. 

Other Resources

Andre de Lorde's: At the telephone is an online Grand Guignol play, in English translation. This mini-drama is pretty smart on why communication technology always seems to contain within it an uncanny sense.

Devil Doll. An American film that borrows stylistic cues from this French horror theater, Devil Doll is also notable for the inclusion of Rafaela Ottiano, a former Grand Guignol actress whose somewhat bizarre performance gives a good idea of the broad, melodramatic acting style presented on the Grand Guignol stage. Not the best film ever made, this version was shown as part of the sadly defunct comedy-cult program Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Realdoll, the World's Finest Love Doll

 Realdoll, The World's Finest Love Doll

"Since 1996, we have been using Hollywood special effects technology to produce the most realistic love doll in the world. Our dolls feature completely articulated skeletons which allow for anatomically correct positioning, an exclusive blend of the best silicone rubbers for an ultra flesh-like feel, and each doll is custom made to your specifications."

c/f Married to a doll: Why one man advocates synthetic love, The Atlantic

Robonaut 2

http://twitter.com/AstroRobonaut

NASA and GM's Robonaut 2 is now twittering from space (or her handlers are).

Punch and Judy 1832 Book

This is a scan of a 1832 Punch and Judy script.

Predating vaudeville, Punch and Judy--with its giddy violence, its cast of stock characters, its bits and jokes and gags, its irredeemable misogyny, its clowning, its anticipation of nonsense and absurdity and mumbling as aesthetic pleasures--is also the phantom haunting the format and internal dynamics of every television sitcom. It does it first. It does it better. There is also a lurking horror within which I doubt is just a product of its times, that "we know better" now.  Its urge to offend is almost theological in scale, undoubtedly compulsive.

If the dynamics at base in Punch and Judy's relationship (Man and Woman as the comedic Straight Man vs. Clown duo, Auguste vs. Joey framework, manipulator vs. victim sketch, a level of implied and/or actual violence perpetually close to lighting up the sparkers) are the spiritual ancestor of The Honeymooners, The Honeymooners goes on to be the spiritual ancestor of all other situation comedies. If one wanted to make the case that there is a level of self-critique going on in regards to Punch's sociopathic hatred of women, it would be that Men (and here the concept Men is expressly, specifically gendered Male) are monsters.

The irredeemable tone and frequency of Punch's violent outbursts makes this very modern-seeming text curiously resistant to domestication, to colonization into a moral text or a sentimental one.

More scripts.