At Nxt Museum, the visitor is the puppeteer

Tales of Two, the first interactive installation from the animation studio Yonk, opened July 2 at Nxt Museum in Amsterdam, and its interface is one of the oldest in the world: the puppet. Visitors steer the characters onscreen through simple gestures that, in the museum’s words, “gradually unfold into shared stories”—less an audience than co-creators, which has been the secret of puppetry all along.

Yonk is the Hague studio of Niels van der Donk and Victoria Young, whose 3D animation for everyone from The New York Times to Nickelodeon runs on expressive characters and tactile, toylike worlds—“personality and imperfection over polish or automation,” as the museum’s introduction has it, much of it sculpted in VR. The studio’s stated ethos is openness: making 3D creation accessible enough that anyone can play. The announcement reel gives a first peek at the world of Tales of Two, and the museum admits visitors on a regular ticket.

Puppetry keeps turning up on this beat. Earlier this month doku_zen built Balming Tiger’s “Janjan” video out of stop-motion puppets, and a decade back we covered a puppet show of Siberian fairy tales that became a videogame. The line from marionette to game character has always been short; a rig is a rig, whether the strings are cotton or inverse kinematics. What Tales of Two adds is the museum handing those strings to whoever wanders in.