obscuritory:Closing out the year with a new blog post about Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Hotel, a
obscuritory:Closing out the year with a new blog post about Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Hotel, a CD-ROM game collaboration between performance artist Laurie Anderson and multimedia group The Voyager Company. It combines work from Anderson’s career with dark, forbidding spaces.Across all its vignettes, you get a sense of anxiety – around the world moving forward, the march of technology, the age of computers, and holding onto our humanity through memories and physical connection. It’s not always clear and at times contradicts itself. It makes serious topics silly and silly topics serious. Maybe that’s the best way to deal with the murky ideas and murky places in Puppet Motel.Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel (read on The Obscuritory)From Anderson’s eye, as we shift from physical to digital, society gets more abstract. She makes a silly but potent argument in a monologue in Puppet Motel that Nixon invented “cyberspace” by ending the gold standard, the system where the American dollar was backed by a large supply of gold. Regardless of the merits of that choice, it disconnected our currency from physical objects, “leading the way into a world that becomes […] more and more made of numbers, more and more… invisible.”The scenes in Puppet Motel are torn by that dynamic. Abstract spaces (a dark thicket of telephones and wires) lead into real ones (a lounge room). Digital objects crowd out physical objects. Phones constantly ring as a electrical distraction.Over and over, the game portrays technology as untethering us from reality and suggests that, as we adjust to that change, paying closer attention to the physical world helps us hold onto human connections.The room that best expresses this viewpoint has an in-game word processor. You’re given a list of options: you can write a novel from scratch, or you can edit War and Peace. There is absolutely no way anyone would do either of those. But the game can offer those giant ridiculous tasks, so it does. (“Look at all the amazing things you can do with a state-of-the-art CD-ROM! You can fit a whole book on here! So now you have to write one.”) -- source link
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