Laurie Anderson Isn’t Playing Video games

In 1995, American musician and artist Laurie Anderson created a CD-ROM laptop recreation referred to as Puppet Motel in collaboration with artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Thirty years later, I purchased a duplicate on eBay, together with a 1999 laptop that might run it. 

Anderson’s work has a means of constructing time really feel very bodily, like a substrate. Her follow has lengthy mixed music, efficiency, and expertise, typically analyzing time and the machines we use to know it. In the ’70s, she would stand on avenue corners in New York and Italy wearing 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. Emerging 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, expertise, and conceptual artwork.

Time in Puppet Motel feels bodily too, and never simply because I performed it on an previous CD-ROM. The recreation takes place in a motel stuffed with previous, half-functioning machines. 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 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.” 

Playing 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 expertise — rotary telephones, typewriters — that may now solely be performed utilizing previous expertise. I introduced a blue iBook G3 and my copy of Puppet Motel to Laurie Anderson’s studio in Lower Manhattan to ask her about her ideas on expertise and its relationship to time, each when she made the sport in 1995 and in the present day. This interview has been edited for size and readability.

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Hyperallergic: Was Puppet Motel your first laptop recreation? 

Laurie Anderson: We didn’t consider it as a recreation, ever. I wished to get away from the thought of reaching something or profitable or dropping. I don’t like video games that a lot. When I used to be a child, I went to high school and as an alternative of claiming goodbye, my mom would say, “Win.” I used to be like, “Win, what?” But 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. Old TVs, telephones, and a really cranky form of typewriter. And additionally previous detective films. We had the shadow of the man within the fedora behind the frosted glass in his detective workplace. Lots of issues casting shadows, issues hidden in shadows, issues getting revealed when a shadow strikes. 

Originally, 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 kind an organization referred to as Voyager to attempt to make digital books, as a result of he cherished Bill 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 individuals 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. People need a t-shirt. They don’t need to see me roam. 

H: At one level in Puppet Motel, you theorized that when Nixon took the United States off the gold commonplace, he “cut the ties forever between the earth and cyberspace leading to a world that becomes more and more abstract, more and more invisible.” Can you inform me extra concerning the relationship between abstraction and our on-line world? Has it modified because you made the sport? 

LA: Yes, 1000%. You notice that there aren’t any objects on the market. It’s all in your head, principally, is how a lot has modified. People 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 first picture is the owl of huge 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 fort in an aquarium. This is 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 house 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 may 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 curious about the collision of human and machine voice?

LA: Well, the BBC had a factor that will do the climate each second or one thing. They would simply say the time and the climate. It was a really addictive and really soporific form of present that I preferred. 

[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 sent it. Good for you,” or, “You better get going.” 

H: If you had been to make a puppet motel now, what would it not be like? 

LA: It could be enjoyable to do this as a result of I’m at all times making puppet motels. They’re simply these massive constructions. I like to think about a factor as a spot. I at all times begin with a way of place greater than time. I had a track referred to as “Puppet Motel.” I assume I believed it could be enjoyable to have a spot for puppets to test into. 

One of my favourite performs was referred to as Famous Puppet Death Scenes. This was a very lovely play of a bit of 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 form of going, “Now a puppet is going to have a heart attack.” He’s a really genial man. And then within the final scene, he’s speaking about demise and what it means. And behind him comes essentially 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. And then the puppet with the scythe picks him up and holds him like a bit of child. And that’s when the emcee dies. He’s the one hundredth puppet demise. 

H: In Puppet Motel, you reference a line of your track “From Air.” You say, “This is the time, and this is the record of the time.” What is the distinction between the time and the report of the time? 

LA: It is dependent upon whether or not your consciousness is the recording or the factor that you simply’re doing. You’re in a number of instances directly. You’re most likely in all instances, since there is no such thing as a time. 

H: Is time journey attainable? 

LA: All the time. Aren’t we time-traveling proper now, pondering again to this?