Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel
Puppet Motel is a 1995 CD-ROM developed by The Voyager Company and released exclusively for the Apple Macintosh. Written by and featuring American singer-performance artist Laurie Anderson and designed by Hsin-Chien Huang, the CD-ROM is a mixture of video, audio and interactive digital artwork. The title comes from a song on Anderson's then-recent album, 1994's Bright Red. The song is among numerous Anderson compositions performed on the soundtrack, which features the first release of the song "Down in Soho". Anderson appears in digitized video form, both as herself and, as the voice of a ventriloquist's dummy. The CD-ROM contains many Easter eggs: hotspots that trigger video or audio segments. For example, clicking in the correct spot will trigger a video of the dummy performing the song "Puppet Motel".
Among features/activities on the CD-ROM :
- Leave messages on an answering machine.
- Play a celestial version of connect the dots to create one's own constellation.
- Play a digital version of an electronic violin.
- View Anderson discussing set design and other aspects of her recent "Nerve Bible" tour.
- More than an hour of music.
As of 2022, Puppet Motel has yet to be reissued or made available online. The original CD-ROM runs on an early version of the MacOS that is no longer supported by modern Apple devices, making the work difficult to access, though video excerpts have been posted to YouTube.