Shadow Puppet is a desk lamp with an anatomical form. A spinal cord rises into an arcing gesture, holding a lamp shade from which the puppet’s arms and legs are suspended. Modeled after human muscle groups and distorted into spider-like limbs, the body of the puppet is both human and not human – in a word, a shadow. Made from 3D printed PLA and a vacuum-formed transparent PETG gobo containing a small steel ball bearing, an LED projects the shape of the puppet’s insides onto the surface below, taking inspiration from Linnebach projectors commonly used for short-throw shadow puppetry in the 19th century. The ball bearing rolls through the interior of the gobo, outlining its cavities and altering the shadow that it produces. The projected shadows place us directly inside of the puppet, externalizing the internal corporeality of its body like peering through an x-ray. The lamp is interacted with by gently pulling the limbs, which directs the ball bearing toward the different spaces inside, taking advantage of a fully analog interface, and mimicking the control of a marionette puppet.
This project started as an attempt to create a light that casts shadows with dynamic, adaptable shapes. The original first version of the lamp was much larger and situated the PETG gobo inside of a black box, to be held and projected onto the floor. The gobo contained an opaque black liquid that pooled and filled the various cavities to create shadows based on the forms that the liquid would take. Formed around a 3D printed bas relief of internal organ shapes traced from the anatomical sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, this first version used a much more complex gobo to place more emphasis on the effect produced by the light. For the second version, I wanted to keep this idea of creating moving shadows using a maze-like transparent gobo, but to abstract it into something less literal and more symbolic and playful to contrast the severity of the new fixture’s form. So, I turned the human heart into a simple heart symbol, and the entrails into a spiral.