silicon meets string: a conversation with an e-waste puppeteer

In a tin-roofed workshop tucked behind a fibro cottage in Brunswick, puppeteer Theo Rinaldi is soldering a vintage modem into the shape of a jester's head. The smell of flux mixes with eucalyptus drifting in from the street, and somewhere outside, a tram bell clangs down Sydney Road. This is not the usual place one expects to find a marionette maker, but Theo has spent seven years pulling obsolete technology out of Australian landfill streams and reimagining it as theatre.

The conversation took place on a rain-threatened afternoon in Melbourne, over coffee cooling on a workbench covered in capacitors, copper wire, and skeletal puppet frames. Theo speaks the way his marionettes move, with choreographed pauses and expressive hands. His work has travelled from local school halls to the Adelaide Fringe, and recently to a sustainability expo in Brisbane, where his twenty-piece electronic troupe performed to three-year-olds and grey-haired engineers in equal measure.

Australia generates roughly 539,000 tonnes of e-waste each year, and only about sixty per cent makes it through formal recycling. The rest sits in landfill, leaching heavy metals into soil that washes towards the Murray-Darling system or piles up in suburban transfer stations. Theo sees the discarded motherboard, the cracked tablet, the printer that gave up in 2019, and he sees characters waiting to be born.

For Mass Musings, this is the storytelling we champion: artists who turn cultural anxieties into performance. Theo's practice sits at the intersection of craft, environmental commentary, and old-school spectacle. He calls it "wasteware theatre," and his marionettes appear at eco-festivals, council-run repair cafés, and in op shop windows across Fitzroy and Newtown. Readers curious about what drives our community can follow that link.

Component Traditional marionette material Recycled electronics source Sustainability outcome
Head Carved lime wood, papier-mâché Phone casings, router shells, keyboard keys Diverts plastic and heavy metals
Body frame Wire or wooden dowel Copper cabling, dismantled laptop frames Reclaims conductive metals
Joints Leather, cotton string USB ports, spring coils, headphone jacks Reuses functional hardware
Eyes Painted glass beads Webcam lenses, LED indicators Repurposes optical components
Costume Silk, velvet, felt Ribbon cables, heat-shrink tubing, mouse pad fabric Reduces textile demand

The first spark: a broken printer and a curious mind

Theo's path into puppeteer practice began not in theatre school but in a Bunnings car park, where he worked weekends unloading stock while studying visual arts at RMIT. One Saturday, a customer returned a printer so jammed it could not be repaired, and Theo asked if he could keep it. That printer became his first marionette, a lopsided creature with a paper-feed tray for a mouth and a frayed USB cable for a tongue.

He had grown up watching Pinocchio tapes with his Nonna in her Perth kitchen and later fell hard for Czech puppetry after seeing a touring show at the Sydney Opera House. The combination of those early memories and the sheer volume of broken electronics passing through his hands gave him the idea. If a printer could be a character, why not a whole cast? Nonna taught him patience, his degree taught him composition, and broken devices taught him to look for faces hiding inside circuit boards.

Inside the workshop: soldering iron as sculpting tool

The workshop is part laboratory, part green room. Walls are lined with labelled drawers sorted by component: capacitors in one, optical drives in another, cracked phone screens in a third. Theo's workflow begins with disassembly using ESD-safe tools, then moves into "character sketching," where he sketches the silhouette a piece of e-waste suggests before modifying it. Soldering happens last, once the puppet has been rehearsed as a cardboard mock-up.

Materials arrive through council clean-up days, school donation drives, and devices left at Repair Cafés in inner-city Melbourne. Theo pays nothing for most raw inputs, though he occasionally picks up bulk lots from commercial e-waste recyclers in Dandenong when he needs specific connectors or laptop hinges.

Tools and components Theo considers essential to the practice:

The cast of characters: a troupe built from trash

Theo maintains a working troupe of twenty-four marionettes, each with a name, backstory, and designated performer. Characters range from satirical figures, like the Minister for Planned Obsolescence, built from a cracked lectern circuit board, to gentler creatures drawn from his Nonna's Sicilian folktales, reimagined with optical-drive eyes and ribbon-cable hair.

He writes short scripts, usually three to five minutes long, that play with the absurdity of obsolescence. One piece features a smartphone marionette attending its own funeral while a smartwatch reads the eulogy. Another follows a printer trying to print itself, jamming halfway through. Children laugh at the slapstick, while adults catch the layer underneath about consumption, upgrade cycles, and the quiet violence of throwing things away.

Characters audiences regularly meet at performances:

Touring the country: from town halls to tip shops

The troupe has performed at the Adelaide Fringe, in Hobart during a winter festival, and inside a Perth tip shop during National Recycling Week. Theo works with local councils to source regional e-waste for each tour, meaning Hobart marionettes incorporate Tasmanian devices and Perth shows feature Western Australian components.

He runs free post-show workshops teaching kids to make simple jointed puppets from broken mice and string. A recent Creative Australia grant will take the show to Alice Springs and Darwin later this year.

The bigger picture: waste as a creative brief

Theo is quick to note his work is not a solution to the e-waste crisis. Australia still exports thousands of tonnes of lower-grade electronics, and the national recycling rate hovers around sixty per cent. State-level landfill bans in Victoria and New South Wales have pushed that figure upward, but enforcement is patchy and much collection still ends up shipped offshore.

What wasteware theatre can do, he argues, is shift cultural weather. A child who watches a smartphone puppet weep at its own retirement is more likely to question their next upgrade. An adult who sees a printer marionette struggle to print its own face might think twice before binning a working device. Theo is less interested in preaching than in creating images that linger, the way Czech masters did with their water sprites and devils.

Strings attached: where the troupe goes next

Next year, Theo plans a schools program across South Australia and Western Australia, integrating wasteware puppet-making into sustainability curricula. He is also developing a feature-length piece tracing a discarded laptop from a Melbourne office drawer to a Pacific gyre, using marionettes, shadow play, and a live score composed from the beeps and whirs of devices themselves.

He remains suspicious of scale, preferring a small troupe and slow touring to mass-produced eco-art. The marionettes are built to outlast the devices they replace. Some of his earliest puppets, including the original printer, still perform seven years on, their joints holding firm while the consumer cycles that birthed them have already turned over twice.