Renowned American musician and multimedia artist Laurie Anderson created an innovative interactive CD-ROM artwork called "Puppet Motel" in 1995, collaborating with artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Nearly three decades later, the piece continues to resonate with contemporary concerns about technology, time, and digital abstraction, prompting a recent interview where Anderson reflected on her pioneering work at the intersection of art and technology.
Anderson's artistic practice has consistently explored the relationship between time and technology through interdisciplinary approaches combining music, performance, and digital media. In the 1970s, she performed street corner pieces in New York and Italy, standing on ice skates frozen in blocks of ice while playing electronic violin duets with herself, with performances ending only when the ice melted. Emerging from the downtown New York art scene alongside artists like Trisha Brown and Nam June Paik, Anderson helped define a generation of interdisciplinary creators working at the convergence of performance, technology, and conceptual art.
"Puppet Motel" presents users with a virtual environment filled with deliberately obsolete technology, including old televisions, rotary phones, and cranky typewriters. The interactive experience takes place in a dark motel setting where users navigate with a cursor-controlled flashlight, encountering philosophical questions about time and memory. In one room, Anderson's voice asks, "So here's the question. Is time long or is it wide?" while another features telephones raining from above, repeatedly singing "Remember me?"
During a recent interview at her Lower Manhattan studio, Anderson clarified that she never considered "Puppet Motel" a game. "We didn't think of it as a game, ever. I wanted to get away from the idea of achieving anything or winning or losing. I don't like games that much," she explained. The project originally began as a virtual representation of her "Nerve Bible" tour, developed in collaboration with Bob Stein's Voyager company, which aimed to create electronic books featuring visual narratives by artists like Bill Viola.
The artwork incorporates Anderson's theoretical framework linking technological abstraction to historical economic changes. Within "Puppet Motel," she theorizes that when President Nixon removed the United States from the gold standard, he "cut the ties forever between the earth and cyberspace, leading to a world that becomes more and more abstract, more and more invisible." This concept has evolved significantly since 1995, as Anderson notes: "You realize that there are no objects out there. It's all in your head, basically, is how much has changed."
Anderson's fascination with machine-generated sounds and voices permeates the work, drawing inspiration from sources like BBC's automated time and weather announcements. "I like that they're trying to say something. That they're all little alerts or they're just saying, 'I sent it. Good for you,' or 'You better get going,'" she observed about the sounds machines make. This interest in human-machine communication reflects her broader exploration of how technology mediates our experience of time and consciousness.
The artist's approach to temporal concepts challenges conventional understanding, suggesting that time travel occurs constantly through memory and consciousness. "All the time. Aren't we time-traveling right now, thinking back to this?" Anderson responded when asked about time travel possibilities. She distinguishes between "the time" and "the record of the time," explaining that awareness exists simultaneously in multiple temporal states: "You're in multiple times at once. You're probably in all times, since there is no time."
When discussing potential contemporary versions of "Puppet Motel," Anderson revealed her continued interest in creating immersive environments. "It would be fun to do that because I'm always making puppet motels. They're just these big structures. I like to think of a thing as a place. I always start with a sense of place more than time," she explained. Her reference to a previous work, "Famous Puppet Death Scenes," demonstrates her ongoing fascination with puppet narratives and existential themes that inform her digital installations.
Playing "Puppet Motel" in 2025 creates an uncanny experience, as its concerns about obsolete technology and digital abstraction prove remarkably prescient for contemporary internet culture. The piece can now only be experienced using period-appropriate hardware, creating a double layer of technological archaeology that emphasizes Anderson's prescient understanding of how rapidly digital technologies become obsolete while their conceptual frameworks remain relevant.
