In 1995, American artist and musician Laurie Anderson, in collaboration with Hsin-Chien Huang, developed a CD-ROM game titled Puppet Motel. Fast forward thirty years, I snagged a copy from eBay, alongside a vintage 1999 computer capable of running it.
Anderson’s artistry has an extraordinary ability to make time palpable, almost like a tangible layer beneath our existence. Her oeuvre seamlessly fuses music, performance, and technology, often investigating the nature of time and the devices we utilize to comprehend it. In the 1970s, she was known to play a violin on street corners in New York and Italy while wearing ice skates encased in blocks of ice, with her performance culminating as the ice melted away. Rising through the artistic scene alongside contemporaries such as Trisha Brown and Nam June Paik, Anderson played a pivotal role in shaping a generation of interdisciplinary creators that bridged performance, technology, and conceptual art.
In Puppet Motel, the essence of time also manifests physically, not solely due to the nostalgic nature of playing it on a CD-ROM. The game’s backdrop is a motel brimming with antiquated, partially operational machines. The experience of playing it is unique: in a dimly lit room, the cursor serves as a small flashlight illuminating a white wall. Upon hitting a power outlet, one hears Laurie Anderson’s voice pose the question, “So here’s the question. Is time long or is it wide?” In another scene, telephones cascade from above, repeatedly singing, “Remember me? Remember me? Remember me? No.”
Experiencing Puppet Motel in 2025 feels eerily relevant, echoing our contemporary relationships with the internet, language, and abstraction. It’s peculiar to engage with a game focused on obsolete technologies—like rotary phones and typewriters—that is, paradoxically, only accessible through process of older technology. I took my blue iBook G3 and Puppet Motel to Laurie Anderson’s studio in Lower Manhattan to delve into her views on technology and its interplay with time, both in 1995 and now. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Hyperallergic: Was Puppet Motel your initial venture into computer gaming?
Laurie Anderson: We never perceived it as a game. My intention was to escape the traditional notions of winning or losing, which I find unappealing. In school, instead of saying farewell, my mother would say “Win.” I found that puzzling. There’s always some competition involved. I wanted no part of it.
H: Puppet Motel immerses players in a world filled with items that were irrelevant at the time of its making.
LA: Indeed. Outdated TVs, telephones, and a rather temperamental typewriter. There were even nods to classic detective films, like the silhouette of a fedora-wearing figure behind frosted glass in a detective’s office. Shadows cast by various objects were a recurrent theme, with things obscuring others until a shadow shifted revealing new insights.
This started as a set-building idea tied to my tour for Nerve Bible. Initially, I aspired to create a virtual show before transitioning into the physical realm.
Bob Stein established Voyager in the ’90s to craft electronic books, inspired by artists such as Bill Viola and those delving into visual narratives, with the ambition to “bundle it somehow. They are, after all, books.”
He approached me with the idea for a CD-ROM based on my tour, dispatching team members from Voyager to document each performance. They’d set up in lobbies, showcasing Puppet Motel CD-ROMs. However, most people didn’t even own a CD-ROM player. They often asked, “What’s that?” It wouldn’t be accurate to say it became a hit—most preferred memorabilia like t-shirts over engaging with my artistic explorations.
H: In one part of Puppet Motel, you suggest that Nixon’s departure from the gold standard severed the connection between the earth and cyberspace, an act leading to an increasingly abstract and invisible world. Could you elaborate on the association between abstraction and cyberspace? Has this shifted since your game’s release?
LA: Yes, absolutely. It’s now evident that the existence of objects is largely a construct of thought. Much has evolved, with an understanding that consciousness is necessary to perceive a world; a world cannot exist without consciousness.
H: Would you be interested in trying out Puppet Motel?
LA: Sure. Just for a moment.
[I insert the Puppet Motel disc into the iBook. The game launches, presenting an electrical outlet accompanied by eerie howling.]
LA: This first visual represents the “owl of big science,” envisioned as a plughead. I enjoy the notion of connecting a plug into his mouth and eyes while he howls.
[Anderson navigates to a different virtual room featuring a fish tank. Surprisingly, I discover this space for the first time, even after months of gameplay in Puppet Motel.]
LA: Here’s a nun circling a fish in a castle dwelling within an aquarium. This nun, seeking to nestle into infinity, dances with an astronaut as they discuss measuring space.
[A hotel room materializes on screen displaying a portrait on the wall.]
That’s a depiction of William Burroughs as a swashbuckler—complete with a pirate’s attire. You could easily cover his mouth with a sticker.
[Anderson’s voice echoes from the computer, stating, “The time is now eight o’clock and one second.”]
H: I’m curious about your fascination with talking clocks. What draws you to the intersection of human and machine voices?
LA: Well, it reminds me of a BBC segment that would announce the time and weather every second or so. It was quite addicting yet audibly soothing, which appealed to me.
[An email notification sound resonates from another corner of Anderson’s studio.]
LA: I adore that sound.
H: What intrigues you about the sounds produced by machines—the ringing, buzzing, and whooshing?
LA: I appreciate that each sound feels like it’s attempting to communicate. Each alert conveys sentiments such as, “Good job” or “Hurry up.”
H: If you were to redesign a puppet motel today, what form would it take?
LA: That sounds intriguing since I constantly find myself crafting puppet motels. They generally take the shape of expansive installations. I prefer to envision experiences in terms of place over time. I even composed a song titled “Puppet Motel,” leading me to conceptualize a whimsical location for puppets to check in.
A memorable play that resonates with me is Famous Puppet Death Scenes. This remarkable work centers on a tiny two-foot puppet amid a narrative involving the demise of 100 puppets orchestrated by an emcee character who’s both charming and morbidly humorous, noting, “Now a puppet is about to experience a heart attack.” The climax features an enormous hooded puppet wielding a scythe, casting an intimidating figure as the emcee succumbs as the last of the 100 deaths.
H: Within Puppet Motel, you allude to a line from your song, “From Air,” stating, “This is the time, and this is the record of the time.” How do you differentiate between the time itself and its record?
LA: It hinges on whether your perception aligns with the event or the recording of it. You exist across multiple timelines simultaneously, perhaps encompassing all time simultaneously, as time is largely an illusion.
H: Is time travel a possibility?
LA: All the time. Aren’t we continuously time traveling as we reminisce about prior experiences?
