Laurie Anderson enjoying Puppet Motel, her 1994 sport (picture Nora Claire Miller/Hyperallergic)
In 1995, American musician and artist Laurie Anderson created a CD-ROM laptop sport referred to as Puppet Motel in collaboration with artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Thirty years later, I purchased a replica on eBay, together with a 1999 laptop that might run it.
Anderson’s work has a means of creating time really feel very bodily, like a substrate. Her follow has lengthy mixed music, efficiency, and expertise, typically inspecting time and the machines we use to grasp it. Within the ’70s, she would stand on road corners in New York and Italy sporting ice skates frozen into blocks of ice, enjoying a violin in an digital duet with herself. The efficiency would finish when the ice melted. Rising within the downtown New York artwork scene alongside artists like Trisha Brown and Nam June Paik, Anderson helped outline a era of interdisciplinary artists who labored on the intersection of efficiency, expertise, and conceptual artwork.
Puppet Motel is filled with issues that had been out of date on the time it was made. (picture courtesy Canal Road Communications, Inc.)
Time in Puppet Motel feels bodily too, and never simply because I performed it on an outdated CD-ROM. The sport takes place in a motel stuffed with outdated, half-functioning machines. Right here’s what it’s wish to play: You’re in a darkish room, and your cursor controls a tiny flashlight that shines on a white wall. When the beam hits an influence outlet, the sport says, within the voice of Laurie Anderson, “So here’s the question. Is time long or is it wide?” In one other room, telephones rain down from above, singing, “Remember me? Remember me? Remember me? No.”
Enjoying Puppet Motel in 2025 is uncanny, its issues oddly resonant with the methods we take into consideration the web, language, and abstraction. It additionally feels unusual to play a sport about outdated expertise — rotary telephones, typewriters — that may now solely be performed utilizing outdated expertise. I introduced a blue iBook G3 and my copy of Puppet Motel to Laurie Anderson’s studio in Decrease Manhattan to ask her about her ideas on expertise and its relationship to time, each when she made the sport in 1995 and at this time. This interview has been edited for size and readability.
Hyperallergic: Was Puppet Motel your first laptop sport?
Laurie Anderson: We didn’t consider it as a sport, ever. I wished to get away from the thought of reaching something or successful or dropping. I don’t like video games that a lot. After I was a child, I went to highschool and as a substitute of claiming goodbye, my mom would say, “Win.” I used to be like, “Win, what?” However there’s at all times a contest. I didn’t wish to be concerned.
H: Puppet Motel is filled with issues that had been out of date on the time it was made.
LA: Yeah. Previous TVs, telephones, and a really cranky sort of typewriter. And in addition outdated detective motion pictures. We had the shadow of the man within the fedora behind the frosted glass in his detective workplace. Plenty of issues casting shadows, issues hidden in shadows, issues getting revealed when a shadow strikes.
Initially, this was going to be a set-building undertaking a couple of tour that I used to be doing referred to as the Nerve Bible. So I assumed, let’s do a digital present first.
Bob Stein determined within the ’90s to type an organization referred to as Voyager to attempt to make digital books, as a result of he beloved Invoice Viola and artists who had been doing visible narratives and thought, “We should package this somehow. They’re books.”
And he mentioned, “Okay, I want you to do this CD-ROM, and let’s do it about the tour.” He despatched folks from Voyager to each gig and they’d arrange within the foyer and have these Puppet Motel CD-ROMs. And no one had a CD-ROM participant. They’re like, “What’s that?” I wouldn’t say that it took off. Folks need a t-shirt. They don’t wish to see me roam.
Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s “The Chalkroom” (2017) VR set up (picture by Jason Stern, courtesy the artist)
H: At one level in Puppet Motel, you theorized that when Nixon took the USA off the gold normal, he “cut the ties forever between the earth and cyberspace leading to a world that becomes more and more abstract, more and more invisible.” Are you able to inform me extra concerning the relationship between abstraction and our on-line world? Has it modified because you made the sport?
LA: Sure, 1000%. You understand that there aren’t any objects on the market. It’s all in your head, principally, is how a lot has modified. Folks just about agree that you simply couldn’t have a world with out consciousness. It’s not such as you couldn’t have consciousness with out the world. You couldn’t have a world with out consciousness.
H: Would you wish to play Puppet Motel?
LA: Okay. For a second.
[I put a copy of Puppet Motel into the CD drive of the iBook. Puppet Motel appears on-screen. We see an electrical outlet and hear howling.]
Anderson enjoying Puppet Motel in her Decrease Manhattan studio (picture Nora Claire Miller/Hyperallergic)
LA: This primary picture is the owl of huge science, which is a plughead. I like the thought of sticking a plug into this man’s mouth and eyes, and he’s howling.
[Anderson enters a new virtual room with a fish tank. I’ve somehow never seen this room, though I have spent months playing Puppet Motel.]
LA: Now the nun is circling round a fish in a fort in an aquarium. This can be a nun who’s touring in circles as a result of she mentioned, “I want to walk the distance.” Now she’s dancing with an astronaut as a result of they’re speaking about area and the way you measure it.
[A hotel room appears on screen with a portrait on the wall.]
That’s William Burroughs as a pirate. You possibly can put a sticker over his mouth.
[A recording of Anderson’s voice issues from the computer, saying, “The time is now eight o’clock and one second.”]
H: I wish to ask you about speaking clocks. What makes you curious about the collision of human and machine voice?
LA: Effectively, the BBC had a factor that might do the climate each second or one thing. They’d simply say the time and the climate. It was a really addictive and really soporific kind of present that I preferred.
LA: I like that sound.
H: What makes you so within the sounds that machines make, the ringing and the buzzing and whooshing?
LA: I like that they’re making an attempt to say one thing. That they’re all little alerts or they’re simply saying, “I sent it. Good for you,” or, “You better get going.”
Enjoying Puppet Motel in 2025 is uncanny. (picture courtesy Canal Road Communications, Inc.)
H: For those who had been to make a puppet motel now, what would it not be like?
LA: It might be enjoyable to do this as a result of I’m at all times making puppet motels. They’re simply these huge buildings. I like to consider a factor as a spot. I at all times begin with a way of place greater than time. I had a tune referred to as “Puppet Motel.” I assume I assumed it could be enjoyable to have a spot for puppets to test into.
One among my favourite performs was referred to as Well-known Puppet Loss of life Scenes. This was a very lovely play of slightly puppet who’s simply two ft tall. And it’s about these 100 puppets who all die. These deaths had been all orchestrated by this emcee puppet character, and he’s simply sort of going, “Now a puppet is going to have a heart attack.” He’s a really genial man. After which within the final scene, he’s speaking about loss of life and what it means. And behind him comes probably the most gigantic puppet you’ve ever seen sporting a black hood and holding a scythe, and his head is a cranium. And this little puppet turns round and he’s so scared. After which the puppet with the scythe picks him up and holds him like slightly child. And that’s when the emcee dies. He’s the a centesimal puppet loss of life.
H: In Puppet Motel, you reference a line of your tune “From Air.” You say, “This is the time, and this is the record of the time.” What’s the distinction between the time and the document of the time?
LA: It is determined by whether or not your consciousness is the recording or the factor that you simply’re doing. You’re in a number of occasions directly. You’re most likely in all occasions, since there isn’t a time.
H: Is time journey attainable?
LA: On a regular basis. Aren’t we time-traveling proper now, pondering again to this?
