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This is a melange of monologues, videos, art-jokes and interactive environments.
Anderson pushes this new medium beyond the stage of technology demo, glorified PR kit
or kiddie toy. She has created a freestanding work of art - one that captures the soul
of a blue machine. The disk begins with a ghostly faced three-prong outlet that glows
and howls into the darkness. Serving as the motel's lobby is "The Hall of Time," a vanishing-perspective cosmic corridor with icons parading across its walls, beckoning
you into the motel's 33 symbol-crowded rooms. A puppet Anderson alter-ego who haunts
the Green Room serves as an infrequent guide. Anderson has always turned the language
of technology back upon itself and into the shape of art. (One room is a gallery of
exotic musical instruments from her performance-art career, like the "tape bow violin.")
Clocks are everywhere, clicking off the time with clipped answering-machine-voice
announcements. Telephone handsets float upright on rigid cords, like tall palms; TV
sets flash static; airplanes turn into translucent kaleidoscopes. The mouse-pointer
becomes an ice-skate, a Ouija-board pointer, an eraser or a floating star. At one
point Anderson steps forward from a maze of chairs and, waving a pair of flashlights
like a runway attendant, recites the legend of Plato's Cave - whose prisoners are
doomed never to see the true images of things but only to glimpse their fleeting
shadows. If that's our lot, Anderson implies, no wonder even the proudest products of
our invention are tinged with regret. In one room, Anderson conducts a lengthy palm-reading interrogation of her listener that's all question and no response; it concludes with
a taunting, "Had enough?" In another, she presents "The Amazing Ouija Floor Board" -
a device that invites you to ask it questions and then seems to go happily to sleep.
The game adopts a variety of interactive strategies; it will record your voice and
accept typed messages, and if you're on the Internet you can download new Anderson
videos. But its chief form of interactivity is the only one that really counts: It
gives you glimpses of how the world looks through an artist's eyes. |
