Puppets
Studio Morphogen · 2021–2024
Puppets is a collaborative puppet theater you control with your hands. It was an experiment in creative tools based on craft, play, and collaboration: a Studio Morphogen R&D project from 2021–2022, released in 2024.
A theater for your hands
You cut puppets out of pictures, rig them with pins and springs, and perform them live. The aim was a theater: something you play, alone or with other people, where the pleasure is in the improvisation.
Performing with both hands.
Building a scene: cutouts, pins, and a stage.
Garden of Earthly Delights
Christopher Kapsaroff animated Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights entirely by hand in Puppets.
Why craft
Puppets was a reaction to how little craft there was in most generative tools, back in early 2021 and still. Ancient crafts feel timeless. The hottest AI images from two years ago already look dated.
In an era of mass synthetic media, craft — traditional and digital — is a guide: expressive play, constraints, and the balance of childlike simplicity with deep mastery.
Improvising together
We also wanted the feeling of a group sandbox, where improvising together matters more than the quality of the output. With @jeffnusz and @JimIndeed.
Enough room for a hand
For a technology to become a creative tool, it needs enough expression and craft capacity that the hand of the creator is present in the output. Without that, the output is soulless.
A paintbrush, a saxophone, and a tractor each offer a different kind of control, and each one is its own instrument.
Craft is the skill of expression in a medium, and something more: craft is to material as language is to sound. A learned mapping from the continuous to the discrete — wood into joints — a shared vocabulary of moves you modify and combine.
Motion language can’t describe
Puppets is also a way to guide generative video. Puppeting masks for AnimateDiff captures the particularity of a movement: the timing, the arc, the personality. A prompt can name a fish. The way you would make that fish jump lives in your hands.
A performed mask, and the video it drives.
The same gesture, four generations.
Prompting is a way of querying an infinite library, and that is a wonderful way to explore ideas. The deep satisfaction still comes from authorship, and from forming a relationship to a medium.
A long delay
Puppets took a long time to finish. In a 2022 sprint we forked the interface into Collager, one of the first image-to-image tools, before Stable Diffusion and before img2img had a name. Collager took off, and Puppets sat until we came back to polish it.
Making it was a joy, and a chance to work with the people at Morphogen. The joy of creativity matters as much as any output. We’re still trying to make creative tools with heart.
