Essay: Big Butt TVs, Puppets, and the Return of Imperfection
How puppetry and lo-fi digital video reflect a growing desire for slower, more subjective forms of media in the age of AI
Is it happening, guys?
Is it finally happening?
The great romancen-ing of analog?
A them can dream but it does feel that way.
In a world now inundated with AI girlie pops talking through their anxiety, AI sexy MAGA nurses owning the libs, AI political slop, and AI, ya know, being a rancorous menace overall, it feels like we are primed for a slowdown. Two things are bubbling up that I think well illustrate the antithesis of AI and our collective desire for subjective, flawed beauty and absurdity: Puppets and Digital Video. Giddy up!
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This past month saw the inevitable return of Coachella, the behemoth music festival that occurs in the SoCal desert each Spring. The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, the storied and esteemed puppet group, appeared at Coachella performing alongside the likes of Pink Pantheress and Justin Bieber. I love their fake-out of introducing “Geese” to a confused but excited crowd. It’s a goose puppet, not your Dad’s favorite modern band of the last decade. The BBMT feels ever-relevant, especially now. Puppets are the antithesis of AI in many ways. They are tangible, oddly shaped, require a human to be brought to life, and have a fun, impressionistic essence. Here they are now, lip syncing to Dear Evan Hanson’s Ben Platt live rendition of Addison Rae’s Diet Pepsi. Why am I getting emotional?
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The BBMT is one of many puppet groups exciting audiences now. They are currently in the process of buying their building to have a more permanent home for the over 3000 puppets that comprise the collection. Less family friendly and more late night weird, Poncili Creación is an experimental art collective known for its wildly imaginative performances, handmade sculptures, and immersive visual worlds. Founded by siblings Pablo and Efrén Del Hierro in Puerto Rico, the group blends elements of theater, puppetry, and installation art to create chaotic yet deeply expressive works that explore themes of identity, mythology, and transformation.
Similarly, Freak Nature Puppets is a Los Angeles–based performance group known for their expressive, handmade puppet creations and immersive live shows. Drawing from DIY traditions, their work features large-scale, often abstract characters made from found materials, foam, and fabric, emphasizing texture, movement, and physical presence. Their performances blur the line between theater, installation, and improvisation, inviting audiences into playful, unconventional environments. Get weird, get freaky, get your whole body into this whole puppet, and let’s have a good time. FNP acted as “security detail” for the BBMT, their occasional collaborator, at Coachella, with their large-scale puppets providing a barrier between the audience and the performer.
Puppets are in theaters, at Coachella, they're moshing, they're reciting poetry. Sophie Truax, an artist and social media puppet influencer, initially thought her creations would serve to help promote her music. Her audience, of almost 1 million across platforms, was more excited about the puppets. Using her puppets as avatars, she creates short comic works about her own life and the lives of others. Also, they smoke.
One of the hottest tickets in town is for Ronnie’s Big Idea, an experimental theater show at the New Hollywood Theater, which uses a deceptively simple puppet premise to explore ambition, logic, and absurdity. Created by Sophie Becker, whose practice is rooted in experimental theater and a fascination with vintage figures like Jerry Mahoney. Ronnie’s Big Idea has recently extended its run, reflecting a growing audience for intimate, character-driven performances with PUPPETS. Give us the silly immediacy we can only experience in person.
I’m a stop-motion animator, so I’m a natural collector. Give me the seashells, the torn photos, the huddled electronics yearning to breathe free. Whenever I find a cheap, brick cell phone from the 2000s, I buy it. This beautiful detritus cocoons the spaces in my home, ebbing with toys, ephemera, and other people’s memories. A few years ago, I brought several of these into school to give away to my students, as I occasionally do with art supplies. Nobody wanted them. “What do you use this for?” asked one student. Um, for fun, obviously! They didn’t want my magpie treasures, and that’s fine. This past semester, I tossed a few into my free art supply bin for students. They were gone within minutes. Something’s changed.
Olivia Rodrigo is at the precipice of her new album rollout. Her latest music video is directed by Petra Collins, her longtime collaborator and tactile image fetishist. The video for the song drop dead, on a variety of 1990s & 2000s-era camcorders and DVcams, creating a rich patina of aberrance and beautiful digital miasma. The single-serve Instagram account Lens_Addiction broke down the hardware for the shoot, which includes modern favorites like the SONY DXC D30 Betacam and the hefty PANASONIC 2 Ms4 S-VHS.
Analog media is making a big comeback online and on social media. The rise of the still point-and-shoot camera among Gen-Z has been well documented, and this interest in the commensurate moving-image technology just makes sense. In a New York Times article about the phenomenon, a trend strategist summed up the appeal of digital cameras as having “a layer of personality that most iPhone content doesn’t.” Certified cool kid 2000s camera, the Nikon Coolpix, is fetching a decent price on resale markets. Companies like Camp Snap seek to recreate the feel of analog through a digital product, with varying results. For some, it’s the aesthetic and slowdown. For others, it’s the physicality of something tangible in your hand.
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Fans of Rodrigo and Collins have taken to playing the video on their CRT monitors, or, as they are sometimes called, “big butt TVs”. The lived-in, hardwired TV monitors are as delightfully aberrant as the means by which the image is created. Online, they can be, and are often, personalized with stickers, objects littering the edges, and stacks of other media providing insight into the world of the author. Tale as old as time, a generation is romanticizing the media & media hardware of the ones before it. These tools access something that feels new and exciting, just out of reach for today’s technology. A flipped upside-down Juergen Teller.
Gamers, as is not always the case, were on this CRT craze before everyone else. Long before “2000s” became an aesthetic trend, competitive players kept CRT monitors around because they simply performed better for gaming in key ways. Unlike modern flat panels, CRTs don’t suffer from image processing delays or frame buffering, which means input feels almost instantaneous. This is something especially critical in fast-twitch genres like fighting games, rhythm games, and shooters where timing windows are razor thin. The monitors also excel in motion clarity thanks to how the electron beam refreshes the image line by line (the “refresh rate”), effectively eliminating the motion blur common on LCDs and even many modern OLEDs in fast movement
A different type of nerdy, T.A.P.E. is a Los Angeles–based analog film group dedicated to preserving and celebrating the art of shooting on film in a digital age. Bringing together artists and makers of all experience levels, T.A.P.E. (which stands for Teach Archive Preserve Exhibit) fosters a community centered on experimentation, collaboration, and hands-on learning. Through talks, workshops, and shared exploration, the group creates a space where members can slow down, engage deeply with the photographic process, and build meaningful connections. Recent meetups have included Video Tape Repair, a Data Moshing Delight, Cameraless animation workshops, and a conversation with Haneen Sidahmed, creator of Sudan Tapes Archive. They also rent out equipment and have various digitization resources. Spaces like this, and others around the world, are speaking to that direct interest and need that people have to express, capture, and explore the world around them through the analog image.
Taken together, puppets and digital video point toward a broader cultural drift away from the frictionless, optimized output of AI systems and toward forms that are slower, more tactile, and open-ended. Puppetry foregrounds the visible hand of the maker. We see the seams, the hesitation, the imperfection that invites interpretation and even disgust. Digital video, especially in its lo-fi, looped, and independently produced forms, similarly resists the polish of algorithmic media by preserving noise, delay, and subjectivity as part of its aesthetic value. Both mediums create space for ambiguity, where the viewer is not just consuming but actively completing the experience.
In that sense, the appeal of these forms isn’t nostalgia so much as a preference for media that doesn’t fully resolve itself. Against the accelerating certainty of AI-generated content, puppets and digital video offer something slower, more interpretive, and ultimately more human: a space where meaning is unstable, authorship is visible, and imperfection becomes the point rather than a flaw.
Just remember, everybody loves Puppets.