Noisy Joints (2025)
Noisy Joints is a zine, the product of a five day experimental workshop hosted by the Mercury Store in Brooklyn, NY and designed by collaborators Camila Galaz, Isi Litke, with lead artists Emma Wiseman and Eryk Salvaggio. The “Critical AI Puppet Workshop” focused on interrogating AI critically through the lens of puppetry, and recognizing the utility of both the metaphors and embodied experiences that emerge from puppetry and puppeteering in a larger conversation about AI, physicality, and the human imagination.
The puppet was a way of rethinking human presence within the automated data-crunching of video generation, to compare and contrast the freedom of human movement with generative AI’s relative inflexibility. Through glitching these systems with our bodies and reframing AI as a puppet, we question the AI metaphor of “intelligence.” These machines are lively strings, linking back to human data, which shapes the possibilities. The strings can be long, as in the photograph we take that shows up in the training data. Or they can be short, as when we cast shadows against a wall with the specific intent of using those shadows to play with AI’s poor recognition of our bodies. In one case, the AI systems soak up our data and model our behavior: how do we cut the strings when you’re tricked into believing you’re holding them.
The goal of the workshop was to develop a practice of glitching AI systems: demystifying their outputs, revealing the flow of control. What does an interface ask of us, what do we ask of it, and how can we slip our bodies into the system to disrupt its logic of categories and recognition? How do we elevate and celebrate the failures of these systems to do their tasks — and find new metaphors to shape the public’s imagination of AI in ways that encourage more skeptical engagement?
The Zine was lead by Camila Galaz. The images here are a selection from “Touching Noise,” by Eryk Salvaggio, which incorporates original recordings of shadow puppets as source material — an attempt to “touch the noise” at the heart of the diffusion-driven video generation process — and then uses prompt-based video generation steered to reproduce the video with an abstracted description of its contents (“Human hands manipulate fabric into emotionally resonant structures”).
The original and generated video are layered over each other, with a layer of digital noise in between them, creating a scenario where the choreography of our human hands touch the generated outcome through a layer of digital noise.
We were joined by members of the Mercury Store’s acting company, Amy Webb, Austin Purnell, and Sebastian Arroyo, whose hands appear in these images. Our studio director was Gia Ramos. Puppeteer Jon Riddleberger also contributed a day of puppet-making expertise.
These images are only one product of the workshop, which is documented in a Zine, Noisy Joints.
