Puppets’ Tales. New Design Perspectives for a Multimedia Archive of a Humanity’s Intangible Heritage

In 2008 UNESCO has recognized Puppets as expressions of intangible cultural heritage and, since then, thirteen traditions from around the world have been included in the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list. In the last decades puppets have been object of study and cultural fascination. This paper aims at suggesting an unprecedented perspective in reading, displaying and narrating this priceless intangible cultural heritage, by both outlining its aesthetic, and symbolic values, and enhancing its processual and material features. These thoughts open a research path that applies the point of view and the tools of multimedia design to tell the narratives, the craft and production traditions of objects that have crossed the history of humanity. The aim is to create a multimedia archive filled with audiovisual artefacts produced by hybridizing documentary media (photographs, videos and interviews) with fictional productions (drawings, scripted dialogues and animated sequences). To test the validity of using hybrid languages and visual codes a didactic experiment will be described. Students of a Multimedia design class were asked to design an archive of audiovisual artefacts that stage under a new perspective the cultural roots, materials and production processes of a tradition worthy of being visually narrated.