Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin, her CV goes on for 11 ½ tightly packed pages including 4 pages of exhibitions  and screenings, 1 full page of fellowships and awards, 3 lines for education (all prestigious institutions), 2 ½ pages of Invited lectures and panels, and over two pages of publications, to name just a sampling. Bookchin, co-author of Introduction to Net Art which famously declared “Make yourself into an institution” has most definitely succeeded in doing just that. Co-Director of the Photography and Media Program in the Art School at California Institute of the Arts, Bookchin is trained in photography, film history, and theory – all of which are evident in her work.

Bookchin has a strong sense of history and the need to revisit the past in order to understand the present, something she comments on in an interview with Rhizome: “I tend to look backwards, to history, in order to speak about the present. It has to do with the fact that my work grapples with the need to be reflective in the present, with something that we are right in the middle of. History allows us to gain perspective.” (rhizome.org) This is particularly evident in such works as “The Intruder” which sets a Jorge Luis Borges short story into a series of ten short videogames, and “Round the World,” part of a series of videos and video installations, Network Movies. In “Round the World,” Bookchin sets contemporary footage of trains, planes, buses, and trucks next to footage from an 1888 recording by Thomas Edison.

Using the resources available on the internet, Natalie Bookchin explores the perception of space and time of the net and the transition to an electronic age.  Coming from a photography background, her works consists of a constant theme of something similar to a photo journal, capturing moments of time such as one of her earlier pieces Databank of the Everyday which “addresses the death of photography in the electronic age, where photography finds itself as just more data in a database”  (contactzones.cit.). The work itself not only captures the eventual death of photography but also how we are growing ever more reliant towards technology – creating a digital space which captures daily tasks such as shaving into computer algorithms.

Moving away from the conceptual themes of photography and more into virtual and physical spaces, in the early 2000’s she focuses more on interactivity between the player and the game or world such as her work Metapet. Metapet takes the idea of the ever popular Giga Pets but goes against the players’ expectations to those familiar to these types of games. The more you play the game, the more your Metapet hates you; encouraging for the player not to play the game.  The game reflects the “demands of global capitalism … suggesting that there might be a distance, or a crucial lack of fit, between the context and the participatory” (bookchin.net). The concept itself also addresses the space between the virtual world of the pet and the physical one of the player. Most games encourage the player to be immersed into the game or the digital world of the game with the physical space around them dissipating around them, Metapets does something different; inviting the player into the virtual environment of the game but punishing them the more immersed they become – almost as if a warning them to come back into the physical world.

As Bookchin moves away from interactive arts such as games, she focuses more on video, combining elements from her photography background (specifically the constant theme of a photo/video journal) to create her more well known works of taking YouTube v-logs and integrating them into an installation space. These video series serve the concept of the private and the public space, with videos of men and women alone in their rooms recording themselves dancing or discussing being laid off- which by placing onto YouTube, these people now enter a digital public space. By placing them into an installation space, Bookchin is essentially placing them into a physical public space with a physical audience rather than a virtual one.

Although Bookchin uses an installation space to showcase her work, her work can only function in the context of net art because the concept of private and public space, time etc. is obscured to what we normally perceive.

Bookchin’s work displays a compelling exchange between playfulness, politics, and individual introspection. Works such as “Introduction to net.art,” “Metapet,” “The Intruder,” and more recently “Mass Ornament” are humorous in their presentation while simultaneously addressing serious political issues such as bio-engineering, cultural misogyny or the interaction between the body, technology, and the social. Bookchin is interested in how the internet and modern technology are helping us to write our own story, constuct the reality of our world in new and different ways. Similar to the work and interests of Jon Rafman in his piece “9 eyes” which examines how google street view is simultaneously recording and constructing a modern reality.