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They come in great numbers. They come in cute purple and green cardboard boxes. They have big eyes and round beaks, and they don't like being held upside down. They are Furby. And oh yeah, they're ugly! But even uglier can they be when they are stripped down to their bare circuit boards and built up again as a veritable Frankenfurby, none the less.

<SEE THE DISEMBODIMENT SCENE

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein she intended to scare the readers of her day, blending gothic fantasy with romantic immersion, drawing upon the knowledge of scientific breakthroughs, and toying with the social changes that occurred during the period we now know as the industrial revolution. All this embodied in Victor Frankenstein, the creator. Today, apparently in the throws of the digital revolution, "Frankenstein" has popularly come to mean the monster, and not the creator. God has left the stage, and the body is often left to lie passively on the altar of technology.

The monster is no longer a contained entity but a shared notion of remotely connected bodies in a continual process of repatterning and designing.

<SEE MORE FRANKENFURBY IMAGES

In collaboration with Gisle Frøysland, Motherboard have dissected several Furbys and re-assembled them as a complete new entity (with the enhancement of additional gadgets) with the ability to connect directly to other bodies, both locally and remotely.

Frankenfurby can be considered to be a puppet in a theatre whose rules are based not on traditional dramaturgy, but on the fuzzylogical dynamics created through the interplay of mechanical, digital and human bodies within the networking environment. Frankenfurby responds to sound, light, movement and infra-red beams.

Frankenfurby has been installed in the café of the Theatre Kunstlerhaus in Vienna during the International Festival of Puppetry for Adults (here) from 3-14 November 1999 where the public are encouraged to interact with the monster. You may also stimulate it into further play, and view the world the Frankenfurby way.

<LOOK THROUGH FRANKENFURBY´S EYE

<REALVIDEO CLIP (2.44 MIN)

<GO TO FRANKENFURBY LINKS PAGE