In 1995, American musician and artist Laurie Anderson created a CD-ROM pc recreation 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 pc that would run it.
Anderson’s work has a manner of constructing time really feel very bodily, like a substrate. Her apply has lengthy mixed music, efficiency, and know-how, usually analyzing time and the machines we use to know it. Within the ’70s, she would stand on avenue corners in New York and Italy carrying ice skates frozen into blocks of ice, taking part in 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 technology of interdisciplinary artists who labored on the intersection of efficiency, know-how, and conceptual artwork.
Time in Puppet Motel feels bodily too, and never simply because I performed it on an previous CD-ROM. The sport takes place in a motel filled with previous, half-functioning machines. Right here’s what it’s prefer 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 right here’s the query. Is time lengthy or is it broad?” In one other room, telephones rain down from above, singing, “Bear in mind me? Bear in mind me? Bear in mind 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 recreation about previous know-how — rotary telephones, typewriters — that may now solely be performed utilizing previous know-how. 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 know-how and its relationship to time, each when she made the sport in 1995 and at the moment. This interview has been edited for size and readability.
Hyperallergic: Was Puppet Motel your first pc recreation?
Laurie Anderson: We didn’t consider it as a recreation, ever. I needed to get away from the thought of attaining something or successful or shedding. I don’t like video games that a lot. Once I was a child, I went to highschool and as an alternative 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 need 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 type of typewriter. And likewise previous detective films. We had the shadow of the man within the fedora behind the frosted glass in his detective workplace. A number of issues casting shadows, issues hidden in shadows, issues getting revealed when a shadow strikes.
Initially, this was going to be a set-building venture a couple of tour that I used to be doing referred to as the Nerve Bible. So I believed, 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 liked Invoice Viola and artists who had been doing visible narratives and thought, “We must always package deal this one way or the other. They’re books.”
And he mentioned, “Okay, I would like you to do that CD-ROM, and let’s do it concerning the tour.” He despatched folks from Voyager to each gig and they might 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. Individuals desire a t-shirt. They don’t need to see me roam.
H: At one level in Puppet Motel, you theorized that when Nixon took america off the gold commonplace, he “reduce the ties perpetually between the earth and our on-line world resulting in a world that turns into increasingly summary, increasingly 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 notice that there aren’t any objects on the market. It’s all in your head, mainly, is how a lot has modified. Individuals 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 prefer 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.]
LA: This primary picture is the owl of massive science, which is a plughead. I really 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 fortress in an aquarium. This can be a nun who’s touring in circles as a result of she mentioned, “I need to stroll the gap.” 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 would 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 need to ask you about speaking clocks. What makes you interested by 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 might simply say the time and the climate. It was a really addictive and really soporific type of present that I appreciated.
[We hear a whooshing sound from someone sending an email elsewhere in Anderson’s studio.]
LA: I really 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 attempting to say one thing. That they’re all little alerts or they’re simply saying, “I despatched it. Good for you,” or, “You higher get going.”
H: In the event you had been to make a puppet motel now, what wouldn’t it 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 massive 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 suppose I believed it could be enjoyable to have a spot for puppets to test into.
One in every of my favourite performs was referred to as Well-known Puppet Dying Scenes. This was a extremely lovely play of a bit puppet who’s simply two toes 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 type of going, “Now a puppet goes to have a coronary heart assault.” He’s a really genial man. After which within the final scene, he’s speaking about dying and what it means. And behind him comes essentially the most gigantic puppet you’ve ever seen carrying 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 a bit child. And that’s when the emcee dies. He’s the a centesimal puppet dying.
H: In Puppet Motel, you reference a line of your tune “From Air.” You say, “That is the time, and that is the document of the time.” What’s the distinction between the time and the document of the time?
LA: It relies on whether or not your consciousness is the recording or the factor that you simply’re doing. You’re in a number of instances without delay. You’re most likely in all instances, since there is no such thing as a time.
H: Is time journey attainable?
LA: On a regular basis. Aren’t we time-traveling proper now, pondering again to this?
