The Jim Henson Company reminds us even the synthetic can be joyous and beautiful and beloved

And after arriving at Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company at QAGOMA, I’ll admit, I was a little disappointed.

Not at the exhibition itself, which has been put together with so much love and care. I just hadn’t thought about what I’d actually be walking into. The puppets had become almost these sculptures. Static. I’d been excited for a thing I couldn’t quite have; I wanted the performance.

Then I put on the headphones, and watched the videos.

The old talk-show clips and advertisements, the documentary snippets. A singing cow selling milk. A precursor to Cookie Monster slowly eating a talking machine. They were delightful, and they made me laugh.

So much of what these puppets are, and the joy they hold for me is in the enactment, the embodiment. After that I could go back and really appreciate the objects, and see the life in them.

A history of human craft

Jim Henson (1936–90) was an American puppeteer, creative producer, filmmaker and director. He didn’t set out to become a puppeteer, he simply wanted to work in television and saw puppetry as a way in.

The Jim Henson Company was established in 1958 by Jim and his wife and fellow puppeteer Jane Henson (1934–2013). In the early years, the company produced the pair’s sketch comedy show Sam and Friends (1955–61) – which had seen the debut of Muppets characters, including Kermit the Frog – and advertising.

Over the decades, the company’s work spanned many beloved TV shows and movies including Fraggle Rock (1983–87) The Dark Crystal (1982), Labyrinth (1986) and Sesame Street (1969–).

This exhibition winds through the entire ground floor at QAGOMA, featuring puppets, videos, concept sketches, prototypes, film sets and animatronic controllers from all these incredible productions and more, including early work for commercials and talk show appearances.

This exhibition truly shows how much the Jim Henson Company was inventing and innovating: early experiments in CGI and multimodal performances in 1984, prototyping constantly, recycling old ideas into new ones.

In the same room, there are Henson’s early puppets – simple, wonky and charming creatures – through to the latest 2020s technology of animatronics and CGI, exploring the company’s work after Henson’s death.

There is an entire history of human craft and making captured there in that room. I saw my own methods at work too, the tinkering, the iterations, the refinement, the craft.

Puppets are extensions of us

I grew up on the Muppets and Sesame Street, and somewhere along the way that turned into a fascination with animatronics, claymation and the magic of cinema. It also, surprisingly, turned into a career.

I have spent the last three years doing my PhD research in human-robot interaction in surgery and in manufacturing, using puppetry, bodystorming and collaborative making as a way of thinking, communicating ideas and solving problems.

A puppet is a tool. It’s an extension of the puppeteer: the creation extends from their body, it becomes their face and their voice. Sometimes, it’s the face and voice of a collection of people acting in concert, an embodiment of shared intentions.

The puppet extends what they can do. It augments them. It makes them more than they are on their own – and yet you don’t feel any separation. They act as one, a collective.

And it’s not so far from what I study. Animatronics is about as close to a robot as you can get while still being a performance tool, and a lot of the rigs and controllers on display are not that different in spirit from the semi-autonomous systems now used in surgery.

So as I walked through the exhibit a question came to me. Do we see robots and AI as autonomous, independent agents, or as extensions of ourselves? We mostly talk about them as something separate, the other. But they are not an other. They are an extension of people.

People built these things and encoded their intentions in them. If there is agency in there at all, it’s human agency. We anthropomorphise them and they appear to take on a life beyond us.

Henson’s creations – Elmo, Kermit, Big Bird – are the clearest evidence that these creations can be joyous and beautiful and beloved.

It’s tempting to draw a line between the natural and the synthetic; but the puppets are ping-pong balls and plastic pile, as synthetic as anything else we make.

What matters more, I think, is how we intend for the things we create to be in the world, and the impact they have once they’re there.

We see the intention clearly here in the Jim Henson Company’s work: to communicate, to entertain, to educate.

Good intentions don’t reliably produce good outcomes, which is why it isn’t enough to mean well by the things we make. We must keep looking at their impact, critically, and be willing to be wrong and to try again.

This is what Jim Henson can teach us; this is what this exhibition captures. The things we make are only ever us, extended a little further into the world. We just have to make sure we keep our grip on the strings.

Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company is at QAGOMA, Brisbane, until April 18 2027.