Natalie Bookchin — The Intruder

1999

Artists: Natalie Bookchin · Year: 1999 · Medium: Net-art interactive narrative — ten small Flash games implementing a Jorge Luis Borges story · Substrate: Adobe Flash; ten mini-games that together retell Borges's The Intruder (1966); arcade-game aesthetics · Place: San Diego, California, USA · Institution: Independent; later commissioned by multiple new-media institutions Natalie Bookchin's The Intruder (1999) is a net-art work that retells Jorge Luis Borges's 1966 short story The Intruder as a sequence of ten small Flash games. The viewer plays the games — Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and other arcade-era simples — each one interrupted by short text from Borges's story. Winning or losing is beside the point; the games are structural, not competitive. The text appears between games and across the games' screens, slowly assembling Borges's brutal story of two brothers and the woman they share. The piece is a clean demonstration of net-art's capacity to graft narrative onto systems that were originally built for other purposes. The Borges story is a text; the games are not. Bookchin's work treats the disjunction between medium and content as the work's primary interest. The games' arcade simplicity makes Borges's grim story more unsettling, not less; the viewer's complicity in the games' violence — playing, winning, losing — reflects the story's eventual violence in a way straightforward reading could not. Bookchin has continued to work at the intersection of software, video, and narrative across four decades. Her 2009 piece Mass Ornament is an important later work in the video-compilation-as-social-portrait tradition. She has taught at CalArts for more than twenty years and has been central to the California new-media academic community. The Intruder is preserved by Rhizome and remains playable in browser emulation. Lore Bookchin's early net-art practice included collaboration with the ®™ark collective, and she has been part of the broader West Coast new-media scene since the mid-1990s. The Intruder was written and built over approximately six months in 1998-99. The games were programmed in Flash with Bookchin's own ActionScript code. The piece has been exhibited at Whitney Biennials, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and multiple international venues. Sources • Bookchin, Natalie — natbookchin.com • Rhizome — The Intruder archive • Whitney Biennial 2000 — exhibition catalog