Per unit

This MFA thesis examines the logic of puppetry as a framework for understanding systems of power, control, and agency. Drawing from my background as a puppeteer in Iran, where the form has long served as a politically charged mode of expression under censorship, I investigate how bodies, human and nonhuman, become instruments of control while still holding the potential for resistance. The puppet operates in my work not only as a symbolic figure but as a methodological tool, revealing how agency circulates, shifts, and sometimes reverses within disciplinary and technological structures.

By translating the mechanisms of puppetry into digital and spatial environments, I explore how contemporary apparatuses, cameras, sensors, projections, and interactive systems shape bodily behavior and participation. These installations create situations in which viewers become part of the system they encounter, performing subtle gestures of compliance in order to remain visible or to activate the work. Through these interactions, the hidden power dynamics of puppetry come into view: how agency often appears through the limits set by the system, and how control becomes visible only when it is performed through the viewer’s own movements.

This thesis also examines how participation can gently lead the viewer to follow the system’s rules. In this way, the puppet becomes both a metaphor and a tool for understanding how power operates in everyday life, how it moves through bodies, shapes their actions, and becomes part of their experience.

Key words: control, puppet, body, agency, power dynamic, performance art, interactive art