Laurie Anderson playing Puppet Motel, her 1994 game (photo Nora Claire Miller/Hyperallergic)
In 1995, American musician and artist Laurie Anderson created a CD-ROM computer game called Puppet Motel in collaboration with artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Thirty years later, I bought a copy on eBay, along with a 1999 computer that could run it.
Anderson’s work has a way of making time feel very physical, like a substrate. Her practice has long combined music, performance, and technology, often examining time and the machines we use to understand it. In the ’70s, she would stand on street corners in New York and Italy wearing ice skates frozen into blocks of ice, playing a violin in an electronic duet with herself. The performance would end when the ice melted. Emerging in the downtown New York art scene alongside artists like Trisha Brown and Nam June Paik, Anderson helped define a generation of interdisciplinary artists who worked at the intersection of performance, technology, and conceptual art.
Puppet Motel is full of things that were obsolete at the time it was made. (image courtesy Canal Street Communications, Inc.)
Time in Puppet Motel feels physical too, and not just because I played it on an old CD-ROM. The game takes place in a motel full of old, half-functioning machines. Here’s what it’s like to play: You’re in a dark room, and your cursor controls a tiny flashlight that shines on a white wall. When the beam hits a power outlet, the game says, in the voice of Laurie Anderson, “So here’s the question. Is time long or is it wide?” In another room, telephones rain down from above, singing, “Remember me? Remember me? Remember me? No.”
Playing Puppet Motel in 2025 is uncanny, its concerns oddly resonant with the ways we think about the internet, language, and abstraction. It also feels strange to play a game about old technology — rotary phones, typewriters — that can now only be played using old technology. I brought a blue iBook G3 and my copy of Puppet Motel to Laurie Anderson’s studio in Lower Manhattan to ask her about her thoughts on technology and its relationship to time, both when she made the game in 1995 and today. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Hyperallergic: Was Puppet Motel your first computer game?
Laurie Anderson: 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. When I was a kid, I went to school and instead of saying goodbye, my mother would say, “Win.” I was like, “Win, what?” But there’s always a contest. I didn’t want to be involved.
H: Puppet Motel is full of things that were obsolete at the time it was made.
LA: Yeah. Old TVs, telephones, and a very cranky kind of typewriter. And also old detective movies. We had the shadow of the guy in the fedora behind the frosted glass in his detective office. A lot of things casting shadows, things hidden in shadows, things getting revealed when a shadow moves.
Originally, this was going to be a set-building project about a tour that I was doing called the Nerve Bible. So I thought, let’s do a virtual show first.
Bob Stein decided in the ’90s to form a company called Voyager to try to make electronic books, because he loved Bill Viola and artists who were doing visual narratives and thought, “We should package this somehow. They’re books.”
And he said, “Okay, I want you to do this CD-ROM, and let’s do it about the tour.” He sent people from Voyager to every gig and they would set up in the lobby and have these Puppet Motel CD-ROMs. And nobody had a CD-ROM player. They’re like, “What’s that?” I wouldn’t say that it took off. People want a t-shirt. They don’t want to see me roam.
Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s “The Chalkroom” (2017) VR installation (photo by Jason Stern, courtesy the artist)
H: At one point in Puppet Motel, you theorized that when Nixon took the United States off 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.” Can you tell me more about the relationship between abstraction and cyberspace? Has it changed since you made the game?
LA: Yes, 1000%. You realize that there are no objects out there. It’s all in your head, basically, is how much has changed. People pretty much agree that you couldn’t have a world without consciousness. It’s not like you couldn’t have consciousness without the world. You couldn’t have a world without consciousness.
H: Would you like 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 playing Puppet Motel in her Lower Manhattan studio (photo Nora Claire Miller/Hyperallergic)
LA: This first image is the owl of big science, which is a plughead. I love the idea of sticking a plug into this guy’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 around a fish in a castle in an aquarium. This is a nun who is traveling in circles because she said, “I want to walk the distance.” Now she’s dancing with an astronaut because they’re talking about space and how you measure it.
[A hotel room appears on screen with a portrait on the wall.]
That’s William Burroughs as a pirate. You could 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 want to ask you about talking clocks. What makes you interested in the collision of human and machine voice?
LA: Well, the BBC had a thing that would do the weather every second or something. They would just say the time and the weather. It was a very addictive and very soporific sort of show that I liked.
[We hear a whooshing sound from someone sending an email elsewhere in Anderson’s studio.]
LA: I love that sound.
H: What makes you so interested in the sounds that machines make, the ringing and the buzzing and whooshing?
LA: 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.”
Playing Puppet Motel in 2025 is uncanny. (image courtesy Canal Street Communications, Inc.)
H: If you were to make a puppet motel now, what would it be like?
LA: 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. I had a song called “Puppet Motel.” I guess I thought it would be fun to have a place for puppets to check into.
One of my favorite plays was called Famous Puppet Death Scenes. This was a really beautiful play of a little puppet who’s just two feet tall. And it’s about these 100 puppets who all die. These deaths were all orchestrated by this emcee puppet character, and he’s just kind of going, “Now a puppet is going to have a heart attack.” He’s a very genial guy. And then in the very last scene, he’s talking about death and what it means. And behind him comes the most gigantic puppet you’ve ever seen wearing a black hood and holding a scythe, and his head is a skull. And this little puppet turns around and he’s so scared. And then the puppet with the scythe picks him up and holds him like a little baby. And that’s when the emcee dies. He’s the 100th puppet death.
H: In Puppet Motel, you reference a line of your song “From Air.” You say, “This is the time, and this is the record of the time.” What is the difference between the time and the record of the time?
LA: It depends on whether your awareness is the recording or the thing that you’re doing. You’re in multiple times at once. You’re probably in all times, since there is no time.
H: Is time travel possible?
LA: All the time. Aren’t we time-traveling right now, thinking back to this?
