CTRL + ALT + CUTE: YONK Is Reprogramming 3D Art for the Soul

What happens when 3D art gets a sense of humor and a splash of emotional intelligence? Enter YONK, the Hauge-based duo turning pixels into play. Known for their offbeat characters, surreal animations, and uncanny universe of strange-yet-sweet avatars, YONK is what happens when the internet develops a soul.

With clients like Adult Swim, FentySkin and Nike, YONK’s work looks like if early 2000s CGI had a baby with a Tumblr fever dream—then sent it to therapy and art school. Their style is instantly recognizable: stretchy, sticky, gloriously weird. But beneath the visual chaos is a deep curiosity about emotion and connection. Welcome to the world of YONK. Please remove your shoes and leave your sense of normalcy at the door.

What was the first weird little digital creature you made—and what inspired it?

We can’t quite remember the first, but the weirdest was a character called Grimble Frap. Niels had convinced me to watch Gremlins 2, his all-time favourite movie, and I guess that energy stuck with us. Grimble Frap was a flying, gremlin-ish guy who was so cursed he still haunts us to this day.

How do you balance playfulness and deeper meaning in your work?

We’re both insanely playful as people, constantly trying out new tools, techniques, and ideas. That curiosity and experimentation naturally leaks into the narratives of our work. We’re not aiming to express deep meaning, but we love touching on small, relatable moments that feel real. The playfulness is baked in.

Do your characters have personalities or backstories?

Sometimes, especially when they’re animated. Their personalities tend to emerge through the animation process itself, we trial and test a lot. For example, we’ve recently been experimenting with virtual string puppetry, and that birthed a character called Johan, the flying boy. The way he moved, kind of wrote his personality for us.

Your aesthetic is so unique—what influences your style? Cartoons, tech, fashion?

Honestly, a lot of it comes from not knowing how to do things the "right" way. We came into 3D with very little knowledge of how to make 3D work and ended up finding out you can sculpt 3D models in VR. It gave everything this imperfect, hand-made feel, like digital clay. We loved that and decided to fully embrace it. Another example is one of the most recognizable features in our work, the shiny black eyes, which also came from a lack of knowledge as we didn’t know how to shade eyes properly. We just used a basic shiny black material and it stuck, we still use it to this day! Our style has developed over time and has been inspired by a lot of different things we see in passing, I don't think we actively look for inspiration as we know as soon as we put the headset on and start sculpting, it's going to look different than we expected. We just go with the flow!

How do you work together creatively as a duo—do you divide roles or blend everything?

We try to blend as much as possible, but we naturally gravitate toward different things. I (Vikki) am currently more into custom rigs, animation, and storytelling, while Niels is deep into coding tools and geometry nodes. The aesthetic, though, is always a collaboration, it wouldn’t look the way it does without both of our brains mashed together.

What’s the weirdest commission you’ve ever received?

I wouldn't say we have an outstanding weird commission, but we did have this moment when we first started where we did portraits of people for a small fee. We made some very freaky-looking versions of people and probably offended them deeply, but luckily our people-sculpting skills have vastly improved over the years.

How do you see your work evolving in the physical world—sculpture, toys, immersive shows?

Last year we got to design inflatable fruit and veg for HorsegiirL’s hayfever tour, and seeing our work blown up to a giant scale was a total dream. It sparked something in us, we’d love to explore more physical pieces. Toys, sculptures, maybe even furniture or jewellery… we’re open to whatever we can get our hands on.

You’re often ahead of the curve with tech—what’s exciting you right now?

Virtual puppetry is a space we’re excited about, creating live connections in Blender. You can plug in a VR headset and animate a character in real time, which feels kind of magical. We’ve been developing more live animation techniques recently and even teamed up with Will Anderson of Wanderson Studio on an animated short using this approach.

Do you think digital art can be as emotionally impactful as traditional mediums?

Definitely. As long as there’s care, effort, intention and a real human being behind the work, it can resonate just as deeply. Animation, especially, has surprised us with how impactful it can be, it’s something we’ve only discovered in recent years, as we used to be more focused on illustration.

What’s your dream project—collaboration, location, or fantasy brief?

We’ve got a pretty long list, but here are a few that stand out:

A music video! We think our work would pair so nicely with an upbeat track and we would love to explore making something that's just visually beautiful! A full identity or branding project. Not many people know this, but Niels comes from a graphic design background, and we still use a lot of those principles in our work. We’d love to brand a festival, event or even a whole company! I think people see our work and think it's crazy looking, but we believe it can be so subtle and functional as well. An animated TV series. It would just be the absolute dream to explore a complete universe built by us, with deeply developed characters and visual style.