In his 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud described humans as “prosthetic Gods”, because with all the applications they had at their disposal they could already hear and see better, remember better and move more efficiently than their forebears. At least when they “put on” their “prostheses” (glasses, aeroplane, gramophone, telephone, camera). Freud was referring to both the difficulty of adapting when using these “aids”, which after all don’t grow with the body, and the fact that they don’t offer a significant increase in life’s happiness – despite the relief they provide. This disappointment in the consequences of technology is more pronounced now than in the era of Freud’s book; the author’s contemporaries were rather more buoyed by techno-euphoria, while we in the 21st century experience a fear of “Big Data” and the new class system forming around the distinction between access or non-access to technologies.
In this context it is almost piquant that the figuration of evil in the Manufaktor collective’s production Pinocchio 2.0 (Schaubude Berlin, 2017) has become one of the most successful examples of a digital body in puppetry and object theatre. This is a roguish character who transforms into a fox/cat figure –...