The Intruder, 1999, screen shot [Enlarge in New Window]

Natalie Bookchin: Agora

Natalie Bookchin, former member of the subversive art group RTMark and currently a faculty member in the photography and media program at California Institute of Arts, has become a leader in the discussion of new media in Los Angeles. In 2001, for example, she coordinated a series of lectures and workshops that addressed issues of the Internet, helping bring together LA's typically dispersed artistic community in the process. She is also a founding member of Action Tank (www.action-tank.org), a technology-based art collective known for using technology for social and political ends to question its impact.

Bookchin, whose most recent completed project is the critically acclaimed game Metapet (2002-03), says that her entry into Internet artmaking was serendipitous. "After spending years reading theories of the death of the author, of the dematerialization of the art object, of the fluidity of meanings and the socially constructed boundaries that frame our practice as artists and critical thinkers," she explains, "it was impossible for me to resist working with and studying the Net as a site and medium for creative and critical practice."

The result? The best example may be Metapet, in which players become managers of companies; as managers, players need a worker to boss around, so they choose a Metapet, an employee helpfully modified through the addition of an obedience gene borrowed from dogs. Designed to be loyal and productive, the Metapet still harbors a few unfortunate flaws -- a tendency to burn out, take drugs, and misbehave if abused, for example. Your goal as a player is to coax maximum work from your unpredictable laborer, balancing exploitation and tyranny with doses of calculated compassion.

Metapet Bookchin tackles timely issues of biotechnology, shifting forms of global capitalism, and new machines of labor. Indeed, Bookchin notes that Metapet in part continues studies on worker efficiency inaugurated by Frederick Taylor at the turn of the last century. "Under the guise of science, or 'scientific management,' Taylor studied workers as they lay bricks, worked on sewing machines, etc., in order to identify and eliminate wasteful movements and 'non-productive' time," she notes. Henry Ford's assembly line turned workers into links in a chain of production, while Norbert Wierner's cybernetics shifted the focus to the worker's internal processes. "Humans and machines were seen as indistinguishable," says Bookchin.

Bookchin explains that the project's aims include helping articulate creative, democratic possibilities in considering ways to exist within a rapidly changing world governed by corporate interests. "Our goal is to join the virtual and the real, creating a viable online experience in which world inhabitants can participate in order to reflect on and affect their own governance," she explains. She also notes that the game offers a new way of grappling with political theories, one that is neither academic nor alienating, but active and engaging as it requires sustained, committed participation. Agora also revises the existing game model. "Thus far, large scale online game worlds have either recapitulated the status quo or relied on fantasy and escapist scenarios," says Bookchin. "With Agora, our aim is to offer a feasible alternative model for the real world and to witness, through the creative participation of its inhabitants, what that world would look like -- what alliances, affinities, and conflicts might arise."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Digital Arts / New Media | Language, Linguistics, Literature & Books | Politics | California | 2000