For several years now, HAU has been focusing on performances at the intersection of gaming and performing arts. Numerous projects are currently emerging in Berlin and internationally, developing entirely unique forms of storytelling, use of technology and interaction with the audience. To mark the start of the new season, HAU has invited Elliott Burns to explore this development.

In the past two decades the art game genre – approximately understandable as a functional computer game made by an artist outside of commercial gaming – has found theatrical articulation on stage. Seen and experienced as performance pieces these projects can be critically reinterpreted as types of puppetry. In this article, Elliott Burns addresses the practices of five artists and collectives in relation to Japanese Bunraku, the concept of Thing Theatre, and questions of agency.

Irregardless of her arctic expedition jacket, scuba wetsuit or iconic turquoise crop-top, Lara Croft cannot escape the pre-programmed contortions her body passes through upon dying. With a suggestive sigh she falls forward, expiring arms outstretched. Ranked amongst the first artist made machinima, “She Puppet” (2001) by experimental video artist Peggy Ahwesh permits the virtual Croft – through its editorial overlay of cinematic rag-doll physics and philosophical ruminations – a momentary inquiry into her own illusionary existence. At the heart of Ahwesh’s film resides a tensioned recognition that tethered to duel-analogue sticks and Ｘ ▢ △ ◯ buttons the avatar becomes a type of puppet. One whose surfacing awareness may be interrupted by being driven into a piranha infested pool, leaving her limb body to aerobatically ricochet underwater pursued by the carnivorous shoal.

A dramaturgical relation between virtual characters and puppetry has been commented upon from the early nineteen-nineties onwards, Steve Tillis’s “Towards an Aesthetic of the Puppet” the theatre studies academic identifying the similarities between “the creation of computer graphic figures and puppets” and the double-vision inherent in seeing the figure as both “a perceived object and as an imagined life”. Into the new millennium this thinking transmuted from animation to computer games, notably in feminist game studies scholar Emma Westecott’s paper on “The Player Character as Performing Object” notes a number of parallels including the same doubling as constructing solo play as a type of theatre, as well as relations between “physical constraint” and “feedback possibilities” found in both the game controller and the puppet’s control bar, and tendencies towards “caricature, exaggeration and amplification" in both mediums.

Today, a wave of digitally astute performance artists make explicit use of game engines and layer in complimentary technical factors to form what can be read as a puppetry avant-garde and who in light of modern paranoias help us probe society’s sense of diminished agency. Whether their puppets are the first- and third-person avatars of their artist games or instead feature physically on stage as robotic appendages, they often require the dedication of more than one human body and in this manner forge new variants of the Japanese Bunraku (Ningyō Jōruri) tradition. Conversely, the affordances of sensors and software programming allow autonomous activity, recalling both an 19th century literary tendency to imagine living puppets – “The Adventures of Pinocchio” (1883) and Olympia from “Der Sandmann” (1816) being famous examples – as well as Dennis Silk’s philosophy of Thing Theatre which argued that objects “wield more power as performers” due to their being unencumbered by the “accumulated baggage of a human life.” (Lawson Lucas; Poster-Su)

As the literary scholar Kenneth Gross notes in his book “Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life”, although the puppet theatre has historically been seen as “lower order” residing amongst an unliterary “world of unlicensed street performance, mountebanks, charlatens, and circus sideshows” it achieves our closest approximation to the “transmigration of the soul from one body to another”. Is it any wonder then that as posthumanist concerns rear themselves again, its medium recirculates itself through today’s technologies?

Modern Bunraku 

Waluigi is framed by the cut-out trappings and curtains of a Sicilian puppet theatre, caught in a purgatorial limbo reserved for AI training models who have bypassed their tasks by detecting exploitable loop-holes. Amongst other lost-souls he wanders, searching for a way out, which will only ever be granted if he accepts the amnesia of a hard-reset. One of several theatrical art game performance pieces by the dmstfctn duo of Oliver Smith and Francesco Tacchini, “Waluigi’s Purgatory” (created in 2024 / performed in 2027 at HAU) continues the story of an AI protagonist who was previously trained to identify supermarket stock. First staged by the Serpentine Arts Technologies at HQI studios with subsequent showings at the FOLD nightclub as part of Futur.Shock and INDEX Biennial, the performance plays upon puppetry traditions. Smith and Tacchini establish an interactive model that requires their dual-supervision of the Waluigi avatar across the game’s multiple stages, whilst also soliciting guidance from their audience. Using a web-application accessible via smartphone, the crowd can shine virtual stage lines across the settings, tacitly directing Smith to maneuver the character down cavernous passageways and to approach other abandoned AI models.  

In this regard, “Waluigi’s Purgatory” is highly indebted to European traditions, nomadic shows that to use Gross’s terminology were “debased, unsophisticated” and “crudely seductive.” It also mirrors the medium’s tradition of social commentary, asking questions of our complicity in the training of models and relations with new types of provisional intelligence. Yet the puppetry form it most resembles comes from further afield. In the Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre the coordination of a single half-life-sized puppet is shared between multiple hierarchically organised “ningyōtsukai” puppeteers, two apprentices who fully robbed operate the feet and the left-arm, whilst the master dressed in simple kimono manipulates the head and right-arm. Off stage the “tayu” narrates the scenes, whilst a samisen player provides nervous percussion music. Though not nearly as complicated as this three-century old medium, the set-up of dmstfctn bears a relation. Set off-centre of the screen, Smith and Tacchini coordinate different aspects of Waluigi. Smith holds a gaming controller and is responsible for the bodily movements, likely also coordinating certain in-game triggers. Whilst Tacchini provides the puppets distorted voice whilst facing tracking software maps the lift of an eyebrow or the drop of a jawline onto the virtual character. Between them they redistribute the roles of master, apprentice, narrator and musician, all the while accommodating a European sensibility of baiting an unruly audience.

A somewhat similar division of operation is legible in the recent collaboration between the solo-game-developer Moshe Linke and composer Philip Wölk. Debuting on the opening evening of this year’s A MAZE festival, “Qualia” (2026) is a computer game with theatrical intent that Linke plays live and Wölke scores. Narratively “Qualia” is an exodus story in which a desert tribe of mollusc-esq creatures must navigate from the relative safety of archaeological ruins out into the wind swept sands, though it is unbound by the material reality of a stage. Instead of viewing our protagonist as an actor in the third-person we meet them as a homunculus would piggy-back their host’s first-person point-of-view. Through the lightest retractions of the left-analogue stick Linke is able to communicate hesitation, whilst dipping the right-analogue downward to one side feigns the brittle bite of a sandstorm. Affects unnecessary to the objectives of a computer game. This deep subjective register is mirrored by Wölk who expands the job of the Bunraku samisen player beyond scoring to become the internal emotional landscape of our wanderer.   

Adding a further complication to the Bunraku formula, Callen Langford’s (Fantasia Malware) “Hand in a Cave” performance at HAU3 in 2025 with Zane Hettinga suggests a way in which in-game realities can be shaped real-time by their external staging. Here the artist plays a disembodied digital hand that akin to the chaingun, rocket launcher or plasma rifle of the original “DOOM” (1993) is centred along the southern aspect of the screen, reaching out into the playable arena. Accompanied by poetic dialogues, the outstretched hand feels its way forward searching out sensory inputs within black-and-white passageways. On stage Langford sits cross-legged motoring the hand and voicing the dialogue that appear in game’s head-up-display, whilst stage-right Hettinga emerges from the shadows to steer a pareidolic computer terminal on wheels. Two computer screens form eyelids to a set up glowing red lamps, thin armatures stretch outward with CCTV cameras attached to scan the surface of illuminated LED pools. The glitched optics of these puddles, fed through the cameras, become animated material relayed into digital waters that have swelled at the bottom of the virtual cave. As the hand discovers these coloured pockets of reality it drinks and drains them, returning the cavern to its monotonality. Here we might suppose two puppets twinned by their shared but asynchronous relations to a virtual habitat. 

AI Thing Theatre

Writing for the Conjunctions journal in 1988, the Jerusalem based poet and proponent of experimental theatre Dennis Silk extolled his argument against the virtues of human actors who he claimed had “squandered [their] strength in a hundred personal emotions” and instead advocated for the thing-actor who has “guarded its strength” in a “form of locked-up energy waiting for the right outlet.” (1988) This purity of gesture, certainty of nature, masklessness, underpinned what he termed Thing Theatre. Dramas of everyday objects. Something of that essence is recurrent in Janne Kummer’s performance “Unreal Conditionals”, staged at HAU3 in 2024, though the things in question have naturally evolved from shoebrushes to fully autonomous devices.

Opening on four player-performers clustered together as if ship-wrecked and salvaging warmth, “Unreal Conditionals” habitually fluctuates between technologically layered dramaturgical conditions. Tentatively the actors might pass a gaming controller from one to another, directing an invisible underwater current or describing a ghostly trail along a sand dune; otherwise, Cru – the magician of the assemble – may monologue on the mechanisation of movement and gaslighting techniques underpinning their craft, all the while performing slights of hand. Intermittently robotic companions enter the stage, their sensors and mechanical limbs intuiting reacting to this foreign arena. First the robots crawl with sensors and software describing their possible movements, next they are tentacular appendages affixed to the neck or extending from the arm of their symbiote performer host. These triffid-esq protrusions recall the robotic experiments of Edward Ihnatowicz, their reactions and uncertain sensory framework recalling his hydraulic “Senster” (1970). 

Of course, Ihnatowicz’s creations were kept at a careful distance, Kummer and their companions are physically enmeshed in a cyborg relation, sometimes fleeing the convulsions of their fifth limbs. Unpredictability pronounces their thingness, as autonomous puppets they represent the “ultimate loss of control by the progenitor over his property” achieving what Silk proselytised. 

Becoming Puppet

Finally, the work of Harold Hejazi asks us to consider what it means to convert ourselves into an avatar. Building on a lineage of artists who have scanned themselves into virtual realities – see notable examples Feng Mengbo’s Q4U (2002) and Walid Balal’s “The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi ”(2008) – the artist and improvisational actor has over the past six years been developing an episodic series called the “Adventures of Harriharri” (2020-ongoing). Played live, each installment follows a blurry low-poly scan of Hejazi who must navigate his newcomer status in Finland, where the artist has lived since 2017. The trials and tribulations of the digital-twin Harriharri include the bureaucratic paperwork associated with grant applications and VISA extensions, as well as political debates with Jussi Halla-aho, former leader of the right-wing populist Finns Party.

More recently the third episode has been tested in a partial and a full ‘audience mode’. Respectively these stagings have seen Hejazi temporarily pass control of his avatar to the audience for a particular platforming section, as well as entirely relinquishing control. In the latter circumstance Hejazi permits a self-organising audience to negotiate who plays and when they pass on the controller, though he maintains his monologuing role but must actively respond to the actions of his puppeteer. Under such circumstances a certain vulnerability is inevitable, a player might inappropriately commandeer the artist’s digital self, yet conversely it provides a social opportunity to step into the shoes of a migrant living within uncertainty. For Hejazi this expansive openness seems to be predominately positive, and it is a model he is currently expanding into a narrative sandbox game that will be entirely reliant on the audience’s interaction with a custom LLM powered Nordic fish deity character. The inaugural performance of this upcoming piece is due to take place at HAU in 2027.

In an age of increased incipient automation, puppets remind us of an older conceptualisation of the actor, one that saw them as “a mechanistic spirit or automaton” who treated their own body as an “august theatrical tool”. (Gross) Through the multiple registers and reinterpretations of puppetry traditions, performance based computer game artists are providing us with visceral conversations about this reality as it pertains to the 21st century. Asking us to probe personal relations with the technologies that extend and alter us. Or curtail us. Puppets, ugly, uncanny, malformed, maddening, can if handled correctly surpass any realist actor in expressing our dreams, fantasies and worst, nightmares. I would argue that the staged acts of dmstfctn, Linke, Langford, Kummer, Hejazi and their compatriots – both human and inanimate – articulate those dreams and manias at the moment we most need to see them.

• Gross, K. (2011) “Puppets: An Essay on Uncanny Life.” University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Hejazi, H. (2026, August 5) “Discussion of ‘The Adventures of Harriharri’” (E. Burns, Interviewer) 
• Lawson Lucas, A. (2012) “Puppets on a String: The Unnatural History of Human Reproduction” in K. Pizzi (Ed.) “Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity: The Mechanical Body” (pp. 49-61). Routledge, New York.
• Poster-Su (2020) “A Grotesque Act of Ventriloquism: Raising and Objectifying the Dead on Stage” in “Applied Theatre Research”, Volume 8, Number 1 (pp. 45-56).
• Silk, D. (1988) “When We Dead Awaken’” in “Conjunctions”, Number 11, Spring (pp. 36-44)
• Smith, O., and Tacchini, F. (2026, March 11) “Discussion on dmstfctn practice” (E. Burns, Interviewer) 
• Tillis, S. (1992) “Towards an Aesthetics of The Puppet.” Greenwood Press, Westport.
• Westecott, E. (2009) “The Player Character as Performing Object’”, DiGRA 2009 Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. London, 1–4 September.