A frame of metal, a platform of pulleys
On the morning of Sunday 7th May the little girl giant woke up at Horseguards Parade in London, took a shower from the time-traveling elephant and wandered off to play in the park…
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/qBXr15K2uSc" width="400" height="330" wmode="transparent" /]
Watching this immense puppet filled me with all the awe that watching the awkward rubbery Japanese androids never could. She is absolutely alive, curious and..hungry. What’s interesting is that both the Little Girl Giant and the skinjobs are essentially human-operated, though the robots are programmed beforehand. Wearing pseudo futuristic outfits, some of them even eerily emulate human expressions with facial “muscles”, while the little girl can only blink and open her huge accordion mouth. To me it’s almost disappointing – I want amazing robots! I want technology sophisticated enough to impress me with its humanoids! I know the day this happens can’t be too far off [right?], but until then this Little Girl Giant PWNS.
October 17th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
For some reason this reminds me of the Barker short story “In the Hills , the Cities”.
October 17th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Seems that’s been around for some time, was a first for me. Sorry to say the rest of that Balayeurs du Désert album used with this video is nowhere near the same style.
October 17th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
I see these via ze LJ rss, und I love not knowing which contributor is posting what, until I click over to ze main site. It gives Coilhouse an odd sense of realistic character. Of unpredictable living, breathing life, much in ze same way ze puppeteers did with ze girl there. Of course, this could be said about any magazine or site, but ze presentation here is ze culprit. Or perhaps I’ve had too much coffee.
Either way, this project has fascinated me since I first caught wind of it. This is a vid of it I hadn’t seen yet, so danke. Magic is indeed, possible!
October 23rd, 2007 at 12:11 pm
That’s truly impressive!
The tongue action and aforementioned accordion mouth are a tad disturbing, but nonetheless ingenius.
October 24th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Oh my! The Sultan’s Elephant!
I was in London for this last year. While the little girl was cool (walking around, riding a specially modded double-decker, and riding a razor scooter), for me, the elephant was the real amazing masterpiece. It had people whose sole job was to operate the blinking eyes and moving tongue when it bellowed. And the Friday it all started was super hot and sunny, and the elephant was drinking water with its nose and spraying it all over the peeing themselves with glee crowd.
The organizers also printed up a bunch of different late 1800’s style newspapers and distributed them for free all over central London describing the complicated time-traveling backstory, which were wonderfully Victorian.
And one of the companies behind it (Artichoke) is doing some kind of street show in NYC next spring. As I understand it, they’re street artists responsible for more of the organization of the Sultan’s Elephant, and not the Royal De Luxe puppeteer company who were in charge of the girl and elephant operation, but still, I’m certainly looking forward to that.
October 24th, 2007 at 2:09 am
IG – thank you for that, made me feel like i was there for a moment. I had no idea about the New York show in the spring, Maybe worth a visit!